Building on Success – Beyond the Obvious: A Closer Look at Good Enough Testing

On a regular basis I have in recent years delivered an evolving keynote presentation under the title “Building on success – Beyond the obvious”. During this keynote I try indicate which basic testing practices are, based on my personal experiences, often key and sometimes even sufficient to “survive” in real-life projects. Being honest and looking at day-to-day practice, I often notice that many structured testing practices, as defined by TMap [1], TMMi [2] and/or ISTQB [3], are not, or at most partly, applied. I often encounter a meaningless test plan, test design techniques not being applied, reviews not being performed and testers not trained and prepared for their job. And this being is the case more than 30 years after releasing the best-seller “Testing according to TMap”, and also more than 20 years after releasing the basic ISTQB Foundations in Software Testing syllabus!

The contradiction here is that despite not applying the proposed testing practices most of us are still releasing systems. However, the release is often (a bit) too late, at much higher costs and often not fully according the expectations. At the project retrospective, management typically at first firmly state they are unsatisfied with the result and the situation, and performance shall be better next time. In practice, next time nothing has changed and often it is the same result and situation. I can only conclude that this is apparently acceptable to the management since they don't really act (although they say differently). My personal observation is that there is a sort of minimum set of testing practice and that there are often in practice just enough to get the job done in a project. In this paper, we will explore and present a minimum set of testing practices starting from the concept of “good enough testing”.