Knowledge is Power!
Holistic project measurements and the importance of unspoken test cases. By André Vondran - Software Quality Assurance Analyst
I once kept a running statistical tally of the test cases I was executing, passing and failing. It consisted of a total number of test cases, and then a ratio of executed, passed, and failed which was then converted to a percentage. Sounds pretty simple eh? Senior management absolutely loved it because it provided the illusion of visibility to them.
At the time, however, I considered the whole exercise a miserable failure. Because the numbers shifted so wildly, it became apparent after less than a week that we couldn’t get a feel for the actual progress being made in testing with those measurements. One day we were 75% passing and the next day we’d regressed to 50% and then maybe back up the following day. Also, because the total number of test cases kept shifting upwards, our total percentage of cases executed kept changing downward.
Looking back I realize two things: firstly, the wildly fluctuating numbers were a marker of big problems with the development process, quality of code, ill-defined requirements, etc and not problems in the testing process (which is, sadly, how they were interpreted by senior management). Secondly, the exercise in and of itself uncovered an interesting phenomenon.
In addition to the pre-defined core test cases we tracked I had directed my staff to write a new test case for every defect they found, if that case was previously non-existent. This is standard practice in any testing process and even in test-driven development unit tests or acceptance tests should arise from serious defects. But where do those cases come from?
When I bothered to document these cases which I call unspoken test cases, our library of test cases more than quadrupled. A technocrat may look at that statement and say, well that’s because you didn’t define the test cases well enough in the first place and it’s a failure of the development team. I admit, this was not a stellar development team and there were definite issues with quality.
However, I believe that if you actually documented every test case that was executed even on really solid high-performing teams, you’d see a similar phenomenon. I can’t really prove that theory, though, because not only do we not have time to document every case run, but because of the intuitive nature of testing, we would still miss some of the cases that were run totally unconsciously.
These unspoken cases that arise seemingly out of nowhere are critical to systems and development testing because they define the human factor. We may execute them based on a conversation we had with the business, or a vague feeling, or maybe just assumptions about how the program should behave.
They add an element of life and soul to the final product that no machination or automation could replicate. They shouldn’t be interpreted as a failure on the part of developers, but more as a realization of the value that a good test team provides.
I firmly believe that measurements and documentation are merely incidental tools and not the life-blood of a good project. But in this case, if I’d been wiser, I could have interpreted my measurements more holistically and offered sound advice for organizational change to senior management and perhaps reassured them in some ways.
André Vondran
SQA Analyst
www.aqasol.com.ar
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