Category: QA

“Bouncebacks’ is not a technical term in common use. In our usage here we are counting the number of times a defect (or issue) bounces back and forth between tester and developer (or other personnel). It is common for a defect to have a count of at least 2 and maybe 4 if some clarification is required. Here we are looking for defects or issues that are bouncing back and forth between development and testers too many times. One of our clients recently did this and then concentrated on the items that had high counts. Not surprisingly they discovered that the majority of the issues with high bounceback counts revolved around poorly written requirements. Instead of getting the requirement correct in the first place, the concept was being clarified by continuous back and forth communication late in the project with a high overhead and testing cost. Call us for more information.

The demographic dividend occurs when fertility rates drop; and and a bulge of people move through the society creating a reduced dependency ratio. A definition can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_dividend. You might ask what impact this has on testing. Several countries (in the world) are currently experiencing a demographic dividend right now. Some are just entering it, other are in the middle and some are exiting it very quickly (more quickly than they would like). With Quality Control (Software Testing) being a worldwide industry, it has been easy in the past few years to send the testing where the population is booming. This has kept costs low and reduced pressure for automation and consideration of ways of doing things in a more planned fashion. As the demographic dividend passes and there are few or no places to get a large labour force the pressure to innovate will return. So will the requirement to do things right the first time.

No it is not the answer.  The amount of testing we can do will always outrun the number of people who can do it.  There is always more testing that one can add to try and assure that less defects are in the system.  However, that will only take you so far.  Inserting less defects in the first place and better planning to concentrate the resources where they are required is a better solution.  Next week we will look at the demographic dividend as it relates to testing (and a lot of other industries).

If we refer to the dictionary definition of Oracle we find a couple of possible definitions that could be applied to the use made by most people of this term although a couple might lead to some questions.

One which raises a couple of questions is an ambiguous or obscure utterance – not what we want in software testing.  The second is a divine communication – very unusual in software testing.

Probably the most relevant one is the which suggests that the person who is delivering wise and potentially influential pronouncements in an orcale.    This is the definition that comes closest to the use made of this term in Software Quality Assurance and Quality Control areas.  The idea is that the person knows more and can use that knowledge to provide better Quality Control in some fashion.

The issue is that it is only as good as the person making the pronouncement.  If they are wrong, then that may lead to a cascade of mistesting and wasted time.  The second part is that it is only good as long as the person is in the place where they can claim to be oracular.  Once they leave all the information and knowledge goes out the door with them.

Quality Assurance and Process Improvement solves this problem.

We are hearing a lot (again) about Testing faster as if this is the answer to continuing increase in the volume of testing that needs to be competed to ensure system stability. However, the growth of systems will inevitably exceed the ability of people to test them and all their interconnections. There are ways around this by testing smarter and considering the impact of the software. However, first we will consider the other fallacies that have been mooted as solutions.