Not too long ago I had a test lead that I pretty soon recognised as someone that didn’t share my philosophy in software testing.

One day I reported to him that I had run all regression tests that were assigned to me.

All tests were executed on the same build (we had monthly iterations and this was done in the first week); and a couple of bugs were found and reported. I also verified a couple of bugs that I had reported earlier and that had been fixed and included in the current build. The suite took 3 days to execute and it consisted of rigorously documented tests that had little to offer to your fantasy. The system that was tested did not have any UI and the final results could only be checked via a secondary tool and/or by monitoring several log files; so it was a bit cumbersome to test.

I guess that I was pretty fast or efficient because the suite was supposed to take 5 days or so to run, so I was rather glad to have done this in almost half the time; and believe me when I say that I wasn’t sloppy.
And especially if it is a rather boring task I tend to think that it is better to do it as quick as possible, without being sloppy, in order to get rid of the boring stuff.

Well, after I had said that I was finished I expected to hear from my test lead what to do next.
Perhaps having a look at the new functionality that we should have tested last iteration but didn’t have time to do (i.e. we were a bit behind the schedule)?
Or perhaps helping the other testers out with their suite?
Maybe verify some bug fixes reported by others that were included in the build?

No, this was nothing that he said. Instead his response was:
“Hmm, OK… Could you test it again?” And I saw that he was trying me with this sentence because I caught a nervous smile in his face that he was trying to hide.

I just shook my head and said “Are you serious? What sense would it make to run it twice?”

He did not have any good answer to that. And of course I did not run the same tests once again…

But that incident made me wonder how many times he had done that to other people before. And in general, I wondered how many test suites are rerun several times on exactly the same configuration just in order to make it look good for some reason.