What Information Does It Bring?
Most of the content I see online about testing is something about test automation, its benefits over testing, what tools one should choose. I think most of it is completely missing the point.
Let’s see it from a different perspective. Imagine you are someone responsible for delivering a software product to a client. Perhaps you are in such a position. What are the questions you would like answers to?
Is it what specific tools testers choose? How fast the last pipeline run took? Or perhaps if they use JavaScript or TypeScript?
I don’t feel like any of these questions is especially important.
What are some more important questions then? How about this one: is there any problem with the product? And if so, what problem is it?
I try to have these two questions at the back of my mind as often as possible when testing. Because that’s ultimately why I’m useful as a tester — I bring valuable information to the team or whoever else is interested.
Going back to the automation part, this is also what I feel most people forget. They don’t focus on what information the automation can bring them. Green or red pipeline runs are not really much information just to make it absolutely clear :) It can bring more information once someone looks more into it and finds out what’s behind those green and red checks. But I’ve experienced that this is not really done on a regular basis, and unfortunately even the red runs are many times discounted and not looked at for weeks.
Maybe last rant to illustrate my point. TypeScript is a nice ecosystem that brings types and other tooling into JavaScript. But that alone brings no information about the state of the product. I don’t exactly understand why a tester should spend a week fixing type warnings all over the test codebase. Or rewriting JavaScript test code into TypeScript. The longer I’m in testing the more I feel such activities are a complete waste of time, especially if they take such a long time. If someone comes to my desk after a week of such an activity and asks me what new information I found about the product, I’d be just silent. This should not be how a tester operates.