Full Stack Testing, 2nd Edition

Chapter 12. Moving Ahead in Testing

So far, this book has discussed all the testing skills a software professional needs to deliver high-quality web and mobile applications. Testing is a broad and growing space that has evolved over decades to include new processes, tools, and methodologies—the most recent being AI capabilities. While there are ten different full stack testing skills today, tomorrow there could be more. Even in such a dynamic environment, though, the foundational principles of testing still hold.

First Principles in Testing

In this chapter, I will provide a brief overview of seven first principles in testing (Figure 12-1) and their critical benefits and look at how they have influenced the evolution of existing tools and team practices. I will also explore how your soft skills—including some AI-specific soft skills—augment your technical skills in contributing to your team’s success. The following subsections dive into each one in turn.

Figure 12-1. First principles in testing

Defect Prevention over Defect Detection

Even though testing mainly aims to find issues in the application, defect prevention lies at its core. Defects are expensive to fix. If you plaster over a crack and touch up the paint on an otherwise seamlessly painted wall, sometimes the newly painted patch doesn’t blend in well and you have to paint the whole wall all over again! Similarly, software ...