Beautiful Testing

Come Walk with Me, The Best Is Yet to Be

This phrase is very common and I am unsure of its origins. I believe I first read it in the collected poetry of my grandmother, Lynette Isham. My favorite poem of hers included this line: “Once there was music in my heart. Then I met you…and I heard the words.”

This was about her son, my father, Roger Heusser. I don’t know about testing, but that’s some of the most beautiful prose I have ever read. I had to put it in print.

For our purposes, let’s look at software risk management as an investment of time and resources to find problems before those problems become angry customers. James Whittaker, the author of How To Break Software (Addison-Wesley), took that idea one step further to say that customers don’t want to pay a tester a salary; they want testing to be performed, and are willing to pay for it.^[83] This makes testing, at least in theory, a naturally outsourceable function.

No, I’m not suggesting that your team outsource testing.^[84] At Socialtext, we develop and test software in parallel (more about that later) and do informal collaboration instead of handoffs. Outsourcing, as an alternative, usually involves “passing off” software to a test team and waiting for results, only to get a hundred bug reports dropped in your lap. Generally speaking, that is neither effective nor efficient—and certainly not beautiful.

I am suggesting that management wants testing to have happened, and wants the results of that testing to be presented in a ...