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I find #4, exploratory testing far more bang for buck than automated testing. I would argue engineers are paid to make services (software is a service) and expl
by mempko 8y ago
I find #4, exploratory testing far more bang for buck than automated testing. I would argue engineers are paid to make services (software is a service) and exploratory testing is far more valuable towards that goal than automated tests.
a) users do crazy things.
b) eating your own dogfood is worth it.
- chriswarbo 8y agoIf by "exploratory testing" you mean things like clicking around on a site manually, then sure it can be useful to spend a couple of minutes looking for anything dodgy. That doesn't mean engineers are paid to go through a list of regressions and edge-cases, look for broken links, double-check calculations with pen-and-paper, etc. All of that can be done across an entire site automatically in seconds; there's no excuse not to. > a) users do crazy things Again, thinking we can check such things better than a computer is misguided. Test frameworks like QuickCheck can stress-test a system with far more strange inputs/transitions than I could hope to think of.
- gitgud 8y agoTotally agree, any repeatable action can/should be automated. It hurts to see software engineers clicking login to test it still works.... Every day
- mempko 8y agoIf it's repeatable it isn't exploratory testing. The point of exploratory testing is to explore, not repeat ovee and over.
- mempko 8y agoQuickCheck is a wonderful tool. Unfortunately most engineers go and write manual unit tests. But even with QuickCheck it is dumb to to test at the function level. Better to blackbox fuzz test.
- piccolbo 7y agoI am dumb -- I test at the function level. I have a theory that the likelihood of catching a bug depends on the number of lines being tested, if each can be assumed to do its job. This implies that if a line calls a function that I wrote, I need to test that function. There is some work based on Kolmogorov complexity that seems to support this but didn't go very far (I did not see any follow up papers). Maybe it's all wrong. I am biased: I wrote quickcheck for R. (by the way, fuzz testing and randomized testing are two separate things).