Importance of internal Software Testing
Sunday, January 28th, 2007It’s extremely important to test your software more than once. By more than 1 person. By more than 3 people, if at all possible.
Even an experienced QA professional can get “accustomed” to the way the software is working and miss quite a few serious bugs.
For example, before releasing our software even as a public beta, after testing it, I usually install it on my computer and play with it for a while. Sometimes I find misspellings, sometimes cosmetic problems, but sometimes - some strange behavior that our QA Department missed.
This Friday after our weekly meeting I was looking through our new software still in pre-beta. We have a great number of useful utilities for Microsoft Outlook (11 as of this Friday) that will be released to the public very soon.
All of them looked good. All of them worked as supposed to. But… When I installed all of them at the same time to try them out - 2 out of 11 started giving me strange error messages.
Which means - back to the testing lab… Our QA tested them one by one, but not altogether.
(If you think of it, there were at least 3 people looking at them before me: a Product Manager, a Developer and a QA/Tester. And all 3 of them missed it.)
Test it. Then test some more. Then give it to your younger brother with a 5 bucks “prize” to find as many bugs in it as he can in 1 hour ![]()
