Category: Software Testing Advice

Sometimes you genuinely need more testers. A programme can simply have more work than the current team can reasonably cover.

Replacing a supplier feels decisive. It is also expensive, disruptive and occasionally a brilliant way to give the same broken client organisation a brand-new company to disappoint.

Large programmes are remarkably capable of having enormous amounts of testing and nobody able to answer the simple question: does the whole thing work?

Different teams testing differently is not automatically a problem. A mobile app, a data platform and a low-risk internal admin tool probably should not have identical test approaches.

Then the strategy is not describing your testing. It is describing the testing somebody wished you had when the governance gate asked for a document.

If the dashboard is green and production repeatedly catches fire, either your testing is weak, your reporting is weak, or the definition of green has become detached from anything a customer would recognise.

Specialists are useful. Four specialist teams do not automatically equal complete assurance.

This is not really a testing problem. It is an organisational courage problem that happens to become visible during testing.

If production keeps finding the same kind of problem, stop calling every incident a surprise. Your live service is telling you where the test approach is weak. The expensive mistake is paying for the lesson and then refusing to learn it. Also…