Becoming a better Tester!
July 11, 2020
⌚ : 4 min
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When Should We Stop Testing

After reading this headline, you must be thinking “why does one need to write an article on this! It’s straightforward - Your test cases are passed, there are no open high priority or high severity bugs, the story is signed off by PO and you are done!”

No, my friend.

There is more to this.

To ensure that the application “meets the requirements” and also to ensure that “earlier requirements that were met, have not been undone”, one takes the approach of validating that the requirements of the software are known and are being met. This validation is via Test Cases.

The typical understanding of Testing is - a Test Case of “what is expected” is documented in a spreadsheet or a Test Automation/Documentation tool, and a human verifies whether an application build behaves as described in the Test Cases.

However, Testing is much more than a comparison of the application with a Test Case. Testing and writing Test Cases are two very different things! Test Cases are a means to achieve some part of the goals of Testing, while Testing has much broader objectives!

I have moved on from writing and verifying Test Cases, to the richer and more unknown world of Exploratory Testing.

Matching Expected to Actual doesn’t necessarily mean you are done with Testing.

Also, running Automated scripts repeatedly to try and achieve Continuous Testing, showing green in the pipeline does not imply that you are done with testing. We will discuss Automated Tests in a future article.

Testing doesn’t or rather shouldn’t stop when your Expected matches Actual in your automated test case. There is more to look for when you test a Product.

E.g. :

What kinds of business scenarios have the clients themselves not thought about?

To discover the unknown, one should Explore!

We testers don’t guarantee quality. We can’t necessarily reach a defect-free product. But yes, we can almost reach to the highest quality of the product. We can identify User Experience issues. We can help polish the perception, improve the rankings and ratings, help make features more discoverable, identify business process gaps, spot losses, detect a leak of information, identify billing issues - each of which alone can make or break a product!

So, testing is enough when:

The Business team will definitely have its reason not to delay the release. If so, you can release incrementally in smaller chunks where you have confidence in above-mentioned areas to avoid unhappy customer.

The intuition that you have explored enough, Product looks right to you rather feels right, Quality risk, considering Team and customer is taken care of - that should be enough to release the product.

Testing shall continue :)


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