Your Mileage Will Vary

Looking at all the podcast, conference and community chatter you could get the impression that everyone else’s projects always follows the latest trends and hottest principles. That everything is perfect, and everything is a success – and that all new ideas are working right off the bat.

First Try… ish

It almost sounds as if testing has to be in a specific way, and that what you experience is wrong or less worthy. That there are no failures, no scrum-fall projects or old legacy systems. It sounds like everything runs smoothly on an up-to-date CI/CD K8 technology stack with all the bells and whistles.

Hmm.. no.

Don’t worry, listen to the “Guilty tester podcast”

The Testing community regularly acts like most places are doing testing from the beginning, in a collaborative and none segmented way. In my opinion, this is significantly rarer than we admit it is, with the large majority of Testers still having to fight (1/3)

— AllCapsTester (@AllCapsTester) March 17, 2018

Every single project/company/context is both it’s own mess and it’s own best. There is a huge difference between all the worlds companies and all the countries traditions around IT. Sure, it may happen – let me tell you the world of IT projects is a weird place, and that’s OK. So take all the stories of successes with the added American car commercial catch phrase goes “your mileage may vary” [YMMV] or as we tend to say coming from a Context Driven point of view “It depends“.

It depends on your context if modern testing is a thing for you, it might work in an enterprise setting of commercial standard systems. Using Robot Desktop automation in testing might work better in that setting, but then again it will probably not be a good fit in your average software development project. In a context of developing software business-to-consumer the web features is more importation than in an enterprise setting. And round and round the practices and approaches goes and goes…

If you look a little beyond the borders of your own project you will see similarities to others doing the same, but also the diversity in approaches, successes and failures. You are not doing all of it wrong.

You are not doing it wrong

– you’r mileage is just different.

When are we Testing/QA folk gonna give ourselves a break?

“Testing is dead”
“All Testers need to learn to code, to be relevant”

We are not in a one size fits all industry! #softwaretesting

— Simon Prior (@siprior) March 4, 2019