Yu Han on what Software Testing means to me

Last year I had the honour of teaching post graduate students the subject of software testing at the University of Technology Sydney. I asked students if they would like to write a post on testing on my blog. Yu Han did, and here it is.

The subject of Enterprise Software Testing demonstrated the existing and interesting aspects of testing. Those lectures and the project in Suncorp are unforgettable experiences.

During the classes, I felt that, most of time, I was acting like a child, playing different kinds of games and drawing pictures with colorful pens. But at the end, there would be some serious discussions, analyses and reporting always broke my sanity.

Those reflections make me realize that my actions and thoughts were more complicated than I could realise, which encouraged me to keep reviewing what I did and exploring how I thought. By doing that, I better understood the purpose behind those activities, and I am being able to sense the essence of what a good testing could be.

I am aware of that my mind prefers to use memory or imagination to fill the gap between the reality and the information once I have received. By linking their similarities, I can better understand the information. But as soon as I came to this stage, my thinking could stop going deeper. I may feel satisfied with the simple explanation, or could be distracted by other information which will draw my attention to something else. Then I may lose the chance to find out the depth meaning of the information or even misunderstand it.

Now I am interested in paying more attention on my flow of thinking. By questioning appeared ideas could be a way to slow it down, which may clarify the understanding or identify potential obstacles hiding behind. It could also be possible to bring back those ideas or considerations which were once brought up then been omitted or developed during the incredible thinking speed. Those ideas and considerations could be questionable as soon as I try to challenge them.

This could turn out that there are missing facts behind the imagination which I feel reasonable but not actually practical. Once I try to gain the evidence to support those ideas, I could realize they are incorrect or unproved. I may need to confirm them before I go further, especially when the goal is based on such ideas. Like those assumptions made in the Big-Track exercise, our group was needed to test our ideas of what other buttons can do, before we finally test how the targeted button works. We questioned our ideas but hard to move forward until we know which ones were correct. We came up with many hypothesis, but failed to prove them at once in practice. After we had some sort of understanding, we found out that we should confirm those assumptions before we continued, which led us to come up a debugging strategy to process our tests. It appears that questioning the information not only could encourage us to seek the truth but also could inspire us to develop our ideas. In this sense, critical thinking could help one to wisely seek information and to reorganize the information into knowledge for idea development.

This now also reminds me the concept of Exploratory Testing. In the previous example, we learned the mechanism, built the tests and proved the ideas all by interacting and exploring with the actual system. It seems that Exploratory Testing could be a natural way to build and run tests while we also need to learn about the system. By understanding how it works, we could come up with how to do the test and find bugs. However, it’s difficult to tell how much time I need to finish the task.

Thanks from the experience in Suncorp, I see the efficacy of Scripted Testing. Our team only performed the testing within several hours. We didn’t need to worry about anything else, knowing other parts of the system and even the depth of the targeted section. It did take a couple of weeks for us to learn the background information and to write the strategy and test scripts, but we could save most of the time if now we are going to test another section. It makes me feel that with a good development and a clear testing goal, the job can be easily done by writing and following test scripts. But it is true that I also feel difficult to understand the system by reading documents, having meetings and even watching demonstrations. It seems easier for me to concentrate and memorize such information when I can apply it, which means learning the system by actually using it.

I am inexperienced to conclude what a good testing is or which testing method is more superior, but running the system to get reliable information, questioning the information to dig insightful connections, finding actual evidence to support the thinking seem to be the correct manners in testing.

Thanks for this subject which let me feel the enjoyment of testing, and provided a real business environment to gain practical experience. I will be happy to get involved in such field and learn more in the future.

I’ll be teaching this subject at UTS again in February next year. The course is open to students and practitioners alike .