Verify, Then Trust

These are strange times that we live in wherein we cannot trust implicitly without verifying. There were times when we trusted brands to deliver quality products. When we heard of a brand name, we said 'Oh! I would use it without thinking because I know the quality of their products!' Or services, or management.

We wake up from such implicit trusts sometimes. Take the example of Alaska Airlines incident. For decades, airline companies implicitly trusted Boeing on the quality of the aircrafts they produced. But that trust was broken with probably the Alaska Airlines incident (accident?) as the last straw, when Emirate airlines, a client of Boeing said, "Emirates would send its engineers to observe the production process of the company’s 777 plane, of which the airline has on outstanding order of 95 units." (Source: ft.com)

What does that mean to testing and quality enthusiasts like us? We need to raise our bar on our craft. Otherwise, the clients would insist on more acceptance testing at their end! It's not necessarily a 'bad' thing, but imagine the financial and reputational implications. You know the answer.

That means I cannot do "Shift-Right" or "Shield-Right". Not on testing and quality of an airplane that's flying. That's the production testing that we are looking at, folks!

The latest update on the Alaska Airlines incident was that it had some plugs missing. Component/installation testing anyone? It surely does not sound like regression testing because every new plane out of the factory need to be tested for every component and installation.

Verify Before You Trust

Moral of the story? Verify before you trust. Don't trust because of the brand because every instance is a new instance, and every product/service instance out of the door can have faults.

As far as Boeing, its CEO said: “We will simply focus on every next airplane while doing everything possible to support our customers…and ensure the highest standard of safety and quality in all that we do.”

Good that they would do. And hope they have humans who can spot-check things on top of their automation!

Takeaways

• Pay attention to nuts and bolts (no pun intended)
• Validate and Verify (test) before you trust, every single time
• Use humans for oversight, and inspire them to do a great job
• There is nothing called "production testing". There is only "production monitoring" for improvement
• You can't say "Oops! I will put that new check in CI/CD pipeline" (Maybe you need to, but that's not an excuse for bad quality development and testing)
• Don't let your clients do the testing

Happy Testing!