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Check out the episode of Gene Kim's podcast with Elisabeth Hendrickson, it does such a great job exploring the myths and realities around software testing. htt

• fuzzfactor 3y ago
  Thanks for this, also there is a reference to her excellent paper from 2000 "Better Testing - Worse Quality?" where she emphasizes the need for engineers to do their own testing for the most part. Still posted in a few places which was worth reading. Inherent quality depends completely on the factory floor. But I would say with code development bugs all you can expect the engineers to catch are the ones that can be found during their combined development/testing progress as it goes along. So they should honestly think it's perfect before turning it over to dedicated testers who will put their full effort into trying to find defects that were possible to be overlooked up until that point. Kind of like having a machinist making motor shafts who can easily see when they are coming out bent and fix it so that doesn't happen, plus manually gage his parts as he goes along to make sure the diameter is holding steady. He's doing all he can to produce what then look like perfect parts. Next the QC guy comes along and using automated measurements, tests the whole shaft along its entire length, and finds a few below-spec items that slipped through the cracks. Feedback to engineering can be used to make sure it doesn't happen again. The engineer is building value as intended performance is being accomplished, the tester is not building value from scratch or doing invoiceable work but they are essential to make the most of the value that is created.