Monday, September 4, 2017

Funny how we talk of testing now

Most of the time, I just do what I feel I want to do. And I want to do loads of exploratory testing, from various APIs to whatever is behind them, all the way to a true end to end.

Today, I however needed, for finally getting to a point of end-to-end exploration, and idea of when the last piece in my chain is available. So I asked:
I want to test X end-to-end, any idea when the piece-of-X is available? 
The response really surprised me. It was:
A is working on such an end-to-end test.
I was almost certain that we were confusing test (the artifact) and test (the activity) here, so I went on to clarify:
This test is exploratory (not automated) and with focus on adding information on end user experience. Is that what A does as well?
I got a quick no. And a link to one single test automation case that the team has agreed to add, for quite a simple positive end-to-end cases.

As I did not test yet, I have no idea what more will I find. Most likely some. Almost every time some.

I'm happy that the end-to-end automation case will end up existing and monitoring what there is. But surely that is not what testing is all about?

It's fascinating how quickly this degeneration of talking around test happens. How quickly the activity turns into specific artifacts.

It takes a belief into the unknown unknowns to get people to explore, when they think they can plan the artifact. Communication gets "fixed" by using always more words, rather than less.