Testing Smarter with Dorothy Graham

This interview with Dorothy Graham is the second in our series of “Testing Smarter with…” interviews. Our goal with these interviews is to highlight insights and experiences as told by thought leaders in the software testing field.

Dorothy Graham has been in software testing for over 40 years, and is co-author of 4 books: Software Inspection, Software Test Automation, Foundations of Software Testing and Experiences of Test Automation. 

Read the full interview here: Testing Smarter with Dorothy Graham

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Excerpts from the interview:

Hexawise: What do you wish more developers, business analysts, and project managers understood about software testing?

Dot: The limitations of testing. Testing is only sampling, and can find useful problems (bugs) but there aren’t enough resources or time in the universe to “test everything”.

The best way to have fewer bugs in the software is not to put them in in the first place. I would like to see testers become bug prevention advisors! And I think this is what happens on good teams.

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Hexawise: When looking to automate tests one thing people sometimes overlook is that given the new process it may well be wise to add more tests than existed before. If all test cases were manually completed that list of cases would naturally have been limited by the cost of repeatedly manually checking so many test cases in regression testing. If you automate the tests it may well be wise to expand the breadth of variations in order to catch bugs caused by the interaction of various parameter values. What are your thoughts on this idea?

Dot: Nice analogy - I like the term “grapefruit juice bugs”. Using some of the combinatorial techniques is a good way to cover more combinations in a reasonably rigorous way. Automation can help to run more tests (provided that expected results are available for them) and may be a good way to implement the combination tests, using pair-wise and/or orthogonal arrays.

Read the full interview here: Testing Smarter with Dorothy Graham

Read the first interview: Testing Smarter with James Bach