Five Questions With Danny R. Faught

Danny R. Faught is an independent consultant in Texas. I always enjoy Danny's frequent Sticky Minds articles, which cover a variety of testing-related topics. If you were at the Conference of the Association for Software Testing a few weeks ago then you heard him in the opening session. And he runs TestingFaqs.org, a compendium of resources for testers. No matter what your area of interest, Danny likely has something for you!

Here is what Danny has to say:

DDJ: What was your first introduction to testing? What did that leave you thinking about the act and/or concept of testing?
DF: I interviewed with a supercomputer company just before I graduated from college, and they offered me a job as a tester. The money was good, the technology was sexy, and I hadn't heard yet that some people thought testing was a second-class role. The tests were 99% automated, so I got to use my new programming skills. I found out that I'm good at breaking things, and I like being the underdog.

Much of what I learned about testing came not from inside this company, but from other testers I met via the Internet and at conferences. But here are a few lessons learned from that job:

• Don't invent a new programming language just because you're inventing a new test tool.


• You don't have to be a reliability engineer to do load testing, but you do have to be really good at both testing and programming.


• Open source tools are what makes the testing world go around.


• Don't automate tests through a GUI unless you *really* know what you're doing. It's best to watch someone else crash and burn with this than to make the mistakes yourself.


• In most cases you can learn more about testing from resources outside your company than inside.


• QA (quality assurance) work requires different skills than QC (quality control).

DDJ: What is the most interesting bug you have seen?
DF: Oh, there have been so many! There was the Mac application that had its background area turn transparent, letting the desktop peek through its skeleton. There was the auction web site that didn't scrub the html from user input, allowing me to set up a phishing exploit in the test database that surprised people for months after that. There was a handheld device that crashed when it ran out of memory, or else it would kill off a random application to free up memory. It's bugs like these that keep the job interesting.

DDJ: How would you describe your testing philosophy?
DF: The testing approach needs to be tailored for each situation. In most contexts, the best goal for the testing effort is: discovering and reporting information about the quality of a software product in order to support good management decisions. Management is responsible for the quality of the software, and they need to get the information they need to determine whether the software is ready for release.

That pretty well sums it up. I tend to focus on two methods for all the testing I do: exploratory testing and automated testing, with the balance between the two varying widely from one project to the next.

DDJ: Is there something which is typically emphasized as important regarding testing that you think can be ignored, is unimportant?
DF: Scripted step-by-step manual test cases. They're a terrible waste of time, a massively inefficient way to find bugs. Some day someone is going to try session-based exploratory testing or keyword-driven manual testing to prove to the worshipers of scripted testing, including the dreaded government agencies, that we don't have to script our tests in great detail in order to document the fact that we did good testing. If you want to run the tests the same way every time, automate them.

DDJ: Going meta (to channel Jerry Weinberg), what else should I ask you? What would you answer?
DF: You should ask whether people should get to know Jerry Weinberg. And I would answer: absolutely! If not the man himself, at least read his books. Jerry taught me that people skills are more important than technical skills in this business. And he taught me that it's okay to be a maverick.

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