On Test Strategy
30 Sep 2020The test strategy of any organisation or department should be focused on one thing: measuring the quality of the application. This is so the business can make informed decisions regarding the application - not just with respect to an immediate release, but future development, communication, or any other business activity.
This definition may sound surprising to many in software development. The industry norm is to see testing as a gatekeeper function. Testing is often relegated to simple functional tasks, an exercise in ticking boxes. This doesn’t even perform a good gatekeeping function - it tells you very little about the quality of the software. This approach merely ensures that the software can execute some basic tasks.
Let me be clear that software testing should ensure that software can execute basic tasks. But this should be the bare minimum. Executing basic tasks does not ask the question “How good is my software” except in an extremely limited function. We should aspire to not only ask the question, but answer it in a comprehensive fashion, and then use those insights to drive all parts of our business. With this key insight, testing transforms from an expensive gatekeeper into a massive value proposition for the entire business.