thoughts from the test eye

This Wednesday I held a presentation at DevCon 2011 entitled Exploratory Test Design (slides)
I like this terminology a lot, because it encompasses the two things I want to see in software testing
* looking at a lot more information sources than requirements
* vary execution and look for many things

It was also a good presentation experience, because I could cherry pick my favorite heuristics, and talk freely about the ones I care most about, right now.
The audience was mainly programmers, and they are equally interested in exploratory testing and software potatoes!

But the reason I write this post is something Joakim Holm said at his talk, that should be told more often:
if you do a lot of testing, development goes faster

When testing provides continuous feedback, developers understand what is good, what is unreliable, and also what is important.
Continuous corrections towards the goal speed up the time to completion.
Testing isn’t a role with its own goal, we are there to help; and I think the most important help is speed, and the second one is quality (acceptable quality can be met in many ways, with testing it is faster.)

Someone might object and say “on the contrary, with all their phases and complaints, testing makes things much slower!” so I will rephrase:
good testing makes software projects go faster