A Celebration of Software Testing

For the second year in succession, I have been appointed to the role of Chair of the Judging Panel for the European Software Testing Awards.

It is a true honour and privilege, and I am humbled and grateful to work with my fellow chair and testing legend (Geoff Thompson), esteemed judges, and to see such brilliance in our industry through the submissions this year. I am immensely proud of our profession. This celebration is only possible thanks to the hardworking team at 31 Media who organise this wonderful annual event. The results are now sealed away safely, not even I know who the winners are. The process is blind and designed with several layers of detachment and independent validation. Nothing in this article should be considered to be anything other than my thoughts on software testing after many decades.

Having performed in many roles and sectors that spanned across the borders of four decades. I can tell you one thing.

Software testing is incredible. The world we live in is only possible because of software testing.

I tried to imagine a (fictional) day in the last year without software testing.

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I wake, late and groggy, from my bed. My smartwatch hasn’t woken me up on time. The day before it woke me at some ungodly hour.

The house is cold. The smart thermostat has been playing up. Some rooms too hot, others like the Arctic.

I check my emails and messages on my phone. It’s garbage. Nothing makes sense.

I’ve been inundated with spam. Viruses. I can’t see through the haze of nonsense. I try to filter the messages, but it’s just reshuffled chaos.

I’d like to check my bank account but the last time I did that the security was hacked.

Never mind. I grab some toast. Wolf it down. At least something is working.

I open the car. Step in. Press the keyless start button, half expecting it to fail. Nothing is certain these days.

The engine starts, thankfully.

But the dash is flickering. The screen which dominates the cockpit of the car is not responding. ?

The Sat Nav is looping.

The wheel of buffering doom is spinning.

I exit the car. Lock it. Head for the train.

Above, the skies are not as full as they once were. Planes are rare, and expensive. Air traffic control can’t cope with higher numbers.

They blame incompatible systems that don’t talk to each other.

The train is packed. Nothing new there.

There are no signs telling me where the trains are going or what time they’ll arrive. They removed them, they just got commuters angry. Passengers may as well rely on fortune tellers for accuracy.

The trains are not as safe as they once were.

I risk it. Crowd on, packed like sardines.

I head into work. It would be great if I could work from home, but the systems won’t let me access the work files. I need to physically be in the building.

The newspaper headlines are dominated by another murder. It seems the suspect might have been going for years but they never traced the crimes across different police units, what systems they have are flaky and unreliable. The world doesn’t feel that safe.

I walk the last twenty minutes to the office. My music and podcasts take ages to load, when they do, they sometimes get jumbled.

I get to the office already exhausted. The day ahead isn’t much fun. We have to rewrite documents that were lost. They forgot to save them. It was on someone’s PC. By time we ask IT to access the machine we might as well have started again. So, we do. Much of the week is lost like this.

I get a call from the doctors. I’ve been waiting months for an appointment. The systems are not connected, the results have been sitting on the hospital systems for weeks and it’s fallen through the cracks.

Intensive cancer treatment is due. But it’s taking them weeks to work the schedule out. Too many duplicated appointments, too many missed, they’ve resorted to pushing paper files around as it’s more reliable.

When I eventually start treatment, I’m overwhelmed with letters and appointments. I don’t have a system or an app that reminds me. My results require me to call in, which takes hours waiting in a queue for a call to be answered. I never know where I am in the queue, or how long it might be. Time I could be spending recovering or with family. These events make you realise just how precious time is.

I spend ages travelling to appointments, only to get there and they’ve been cancelled.

They can’t see many people each day. The scanners and radiotherapy machines take a long time to configure, and results are printed out, handed to consultants to review. They’d like to give me daily treatment, but they can’t.

To take my mind of it, I want to book a cinema ticket. The website takes ages to load, it’s not very accessible, I’d like to be able to see how many seats are booked, I don’t like it when it’s too busy, but the option to allocate seating was taken offline as it kept overselling tickets that didn’t exist.

I head for home. I stop for something to eat. The place is packed. The menu has a great deal of choice, but when I ask almost everything on it is not available. They’ve had problems with their automated ordering system.

I get back to my cold house. No streaming services. Limited channels. DVDs and CDs are my primary options.

Fridge is almost empty, but I can’t face a trip to the shops, too many people, too much risk to my health. Stocks are low, and often unpredictable. It takes far less time to go there than navigate the websites and messed up orders. So I’ll just wait until tomorrow and hope I’m feeling more up to it.

I drag out my old digital alarm clock and set it. I manually override the smart heating systems. Some days, it feels like I’m living in the 80s.

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The seats you are sitting on. Designed using software. The clothes you are wearing. Designed using software. The electricity, always on, always reliable, managed by software. Your ability to book your tables, to travel, for most of us to live in reasonable safety and security – all controlled by software that someone has tested. The very devise that you are reading this on – software tested.

We once marvelled at the future. Flying cars. We could look at these old Science Fiction films and feel we haven’t progressed much. Yet we take progress for granted. Progress built on the reliability and quality only possible because of the dedicated work of professionals in the field of software testing.

In the palm of your hand, a device that is a phone, high definition digital camera, a diary, a colour TV, an infinite juke box, a video rental store, a library, a word processor, an email engine, a shopping centre where almost anything can be delivered to you in hours, a food ordering system, a gaming console, a photo book, a two way video calling machine that acts like broadcasting (yes, this alone would have wowed most of us three decades back), a bank account management system (that was only accessible to staff decades ago on green screen monitors, I know, I was there), a vaccination record, a weather station, a news service that is often faster than traditional broadcasting and a day ahead of newspapers, a way to communicate with family, friends, and even people around the world you’ve never met, a tool to give you directions using satellites. A device that will give you the answer to almost anything in the world in microseconds. And that’s just one tiny thing that you carry with you everywhere.

The entire world around us, in all the places we take for granted, is only possible because of the work of our profession.

The very foundations of society that we enjoy today is built by often silent, dedicated and unassuming people in software testing.

So, on a cold night in London in November, this is your chance to remember everything you do. Everything that you have silently contributed to. Everything the profession has given us and will continue to give us in the future. Raise a glass, celebrate, for software testing is truly an inspiring, valuable and noble profession.