Common mistakes in Testing

Mistakes in Testing:


1. The Role of Testing: who does the testing team serve, and how does it do that?
2. Planning the Testing Effort: how should the whole team’s work be organized?
3. Personnel Issues: who should test?
4. The Tester at Work: designing, writing, and maintaining individual tests.
5. Technology Rampant: quick technological fixes for hard problems.

Common mistakes that I see are:

• Communication: All team members need to be able to communicate with each other. A tester needs to know what to test, when to test, and the importance of what is to be tested
• Ability to change: Schedules & resources change so everyone on the team need to be able to understand that change is inevitable.
• Documentation: this is key especially in test steps, defect reports and findings reports. If you find a defect you have to be able to allow the next person to recreate it by providing them with detailed steps.
• Automation: Not everything can be automated nor should it be. Pick the tests that you find you are testing the most, smoke tests are great candidates for automation.
• Results: Don’t be fooled by the results. If a result shows that a test failed, investigate it before throwing up a flag.

Resource:  PDF called “Classic Testing Mistakes” by Brian Marick.