Applied Software Project Management

Using Software Testing Effectively

Software testing is often the most difficult area of software development for a project manager to put in place because, unlike other disciplines of software engineering, many people have a negative attitude toward it. Some people think that good programmers simply don't write bugs, so if they hire good programmers, then they don't need testers. Others only see software testing as something that holds back development. However, there are many organizations where software testing is used as an effective tool for reducing project schedules and increasing user satisfaction. If a project manager works to combat the negative attitudes about testing, he can achieve these results on his own projects.

Commonly, people (mistakenly) think about software testing in one of two ways. Sometimes they expect testers to be "all-powerful." They should be able to catch every single bug in the software so that there will never be a user error or complaint, ever. To someone with this mindset, any complaint that comes from a user is seen as a failure of the software testers. On the other hand, people sometimes consider software testers to be little more than bean counters, whose job is to simply look for typos and for "insignificant" errors that the programmers might have missed in their "exhaustive" testing. Paradoxically, some people can even hold both of these misconceptions simultaneously. In other words, the expectations put on software testers are not only impossible ...