Thursday, November 1, 2012

Does it work vs Can it break? QA definitions.

I sense more than a bit of disrespect for the common saying that QA is dead or dying.  In all honestly, quality is a continuum, and no marketable software product I know of is completely absent of some level of testing or quality effort, nor completely absent of defects.  Still, it's worth bearing in mind that quality is hard, and most people don't produce software with relatively high degrees of quality.  I think most people don't understand quality, because the word itself encompasses many things to many people, at different times and different ways.  Grasping the landscape of "qualities" and "value" is not a task for the feeble-minded (though I don't claim that good testers aren't sometimes feeble, nor that feeble testers are never good).

So, I like this quote:
"'Beware of the above code. I have only tested that it works. I haven't actually tried it.'" (Unit Tests Don't Find Bugs: the Death of QA)