I’ve been working on some abstracts for conferences I would like to tell something about my new assignment for 2012; PointZERO®. For people who don’t know anything about this I would refer them to a blog I wrote about “Cutting on quality? Or implementing quality?” One of the main features of PointZERO is the removal of what I would call ‘Insane Testing’, based on Einstein: “Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Why do testers (or other people in IT) have that insanity? Why don’t they cure themselves? Are they dumb?

Maybe they are, but at least they can act real dumb. I think testers are the only kind of people that do expect a different result when doing the same exercise. Partly because we think this could happen, and partly because that’s how we test. But let’s be honest, it happens a lot of times that when doing the same exercise something else happens! But we are still doing the same exercise, the same! By hand! Why are we doing that by hand, again and again and again?

These repeating tasks should be automated! Because when they are automated you are sure they are executed exactly the same and you’re not doing an insane task. This is where industrialized, or automated, regression testing comes to help out. Insane Testing done by tools!

These tools help us to industrialize testing. That sounds negative, but we need tools to do more, better and easier testing. Because Industrialization is the process of social and economic change that transforms a human group from an agrarian society into an industrial one. And we should make it a testing change!

Testers should have more knowledge of the tools available around them. Tools that let them executed tests faster. That let them create test cases automatically. And maybe even create them and execute them. Model-Based Testing can be the answer to that. But either way there options available to help testers with all in testing. Let’s stop the insanity and get other results…

1. Armando Dorsek Says:
   December 12th, 2011 at 15:24

   Hi Ewald,

   You are *so* right that testers should quit doing repetitive work that does not add value. I am growing more and more fond of Lean thinking, which is so appropriate in this area too. I believe that a lot of testers will need to switch from ‘doing it because we have always done so’ to actually making a difference. You might want to check out my last blog on the need of standardization in a test team, “http://verified.nl/wordpress/?p=126″.

   Kind regards,
   Armando

2. Trackbacks Says:
   February 23rd, 2012 at 10:58
   • Business Quality with PointZERO; A next step in QA & Testing :: Software Testing and more