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Spending Testing Time Effectively

For this weeks blog for the topic Quality Assurance and Testing, I read an article titled “5 Reasons you are wasting your testing time.” That is not to say that testing is a waste of time, but rather as the first sentence says, “Not all our testing time is spent effectively.”

The blog goes on to list the five reasons that a programmer might be using their testing time ineffectively, which are as follows: (1) “You don’t set a clear goal for your testing task;” (2) “You don’t understand the value of the feature for your End User;” (3) “You do not keep track of what you tested, your findings and the other ideas you got while testing;” (4) “You do not consult existing information to get insights into your test;” And (5) “You do not do post-test reviews and feedback sessions with your peers.”

These are all straightforward ideas, but I’m sure most programmers testing their code have fallen into several of these, if not all. This list provides a framework to avoid these pitfalls. In class, we have been going over ways to be more methodical when testing. This list is a little more elementary than what we have covered, but it is good information to use nonetheless.

A key takeaway is to treat testing more like a science than throwing it together willy-nilly. There has to be a method to the madness. You have to know what you want the test to do. You should have a clear understanding what the end product should look like and how it should look to the end user.

The final section in the article said testing isn’t “Rocket Science, but it is not a trivial task either.” It should not be seen as something that could be done by almost everyone, which is a common belief in the industry. This is not true. It is an important job that should be done right. It requires being very organized and staying on top of things. There are many things that can be done haphazardly. Testing is not one of them.

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