Wherein Bianca is grumpy, Hazim avoids a round of fisticuffs, and process change makes everything happy again

"We have a start on more test cases" Jason replied, shooting dark looks at Bianca. "But we'd rather have you all brainstorm them with us rather than doing it all ourselves."

"Oh geez this is going to take all day!" Lucas grimaced. "You two always dream up huge numbers of test cases!"

"That's why we're the testers!" Daphne teased.

"Not that customers would ever do half of them" Bianca groused.

"Now that's not true" Oliver replied. "Remember how you said that last time, and then the first thing people did in the usability studies was exactly that sequence of steps you said they would never do?"

"Well, ..." Bianca still looked petulant.

"Besides, it doesn't matter whether customers will do them or not" Hazim stepped in. "I haven't known you long, Bianca, but from what I can tell so far you don't intentionally write bugs, do you?"

"Of course not!" Bianca replied indignantly.

"So if a test case catches a bug that sneaks in, that's a good thing? Even if a customer never would have run into it?" Hazim continued.

"I suppose." Bianca seemed to be warming up to the idea, but she clearly had a ways to go.

Jason had been trying to get in to the conversation and finally succeeded. "You do have some good points, Bianca. Our devious minds never stop thinking of potential problems, but just because we can think of something that might go wrong doesn't mean we necessarily care whether it does. One change we would like to make to our process this time around is to have the entire team prioritize test cases, just like we prioritize features. That way we always have the most important tests finished, just like we always have the most important features finished."

Bianca brightened. "Now that's a plan I can be happy with" she said. "Let's invent us some test cases!

Posted by The Braidy Tester at 07:30 AM  Permalink