Taking Testing Seriously

CHAPTER 8Prospective Testing

—By James Bach and Jeff Nadelman

One of the tenets of Rapid Software Testing is that responsible testers think in a certain way. We cannot have a mere quality mindset; we need something better—a failure mindset. In a phrase, we must have “faith in failure.” This is needed to tune our senses and biases, to maximize our sensitivity to failure.

This is a chapter about a particular application of that testing mindset, which we call prospective testing. What does that mean? Well, most testing could be called inspective. Someone brings you a product and asks you to look it over and find problems with it. The product is there, and it's ready to be examined. Prospective testing, on the other hand, happens before there is a product that exists in a runnable form.

We define prospective testing as testing precursors to a built product. Instead of encountering working code, the tester engages with someone else's imagination of the product. The term was coined by James Bach and Antony Marcano in the course of conversations during June of 2007.¹

A fundamental part of prospective testing is critical distance, described in Chapter 2. Critical distance is why asking someone else to review an email you've just written is a great way to find typos and other problems in your writing, even if you are a better writer than your reviewer. An easy way to achieve critical distance is for two or more people who have different educations, temperaments, and goals to work together. ...