Beautiful Testing

Chapter 13. Software Development Is a Creative Process

Chris McMahon

Most of the well-known software development quality processes come to us from the manufacturing industry. ISO9000, Six Sigma, and Lean all come from the assembly line, as does CMM to a certain extent. They are certainly all effective in the environments in which they were conceived.

And yet for every software business that succeeds in improving quality by these means, any number of others fail to get any benefit, regardless of how much they spend implementing the systems. At the same time, there are any number of highly successful software businesses and software products that succeed even though they follow no accepted quality processes at all.

A number of us in the software testing and development community have begun to suspect that we have been applying processes to the analysis of quality in software development that do not map to the actual work that we do. A few of us go further and suggest that software development, although it has roots in computer science and engineering, is now fundamentally a creative process, not a manufacturing activity or an engineering discipline at all. When we try to analyze and evaluate what we are doing, we are using the wrong tools when we look to manufacturing and engineering.

A software tester who goes about his work as if he were inspecting widgets on an assembly line is almost certainly not adding much value to the project. But a software tester who goes about his work as if ...