thoughts from the test eye

At EuroSTAR 2019 I was co-speaking with Henrik Emilsson on a half-day tutorial on using quality characteristics.
My favorite parts of these intense events are the questions when you don’t know what will happen.
In one of these I ended my answer with “if testing is easy, you’re doing something wrong”.
I remember how happy I was with that sentence, it fitted perfect in the context, and in a sense summarized both how I see testing, and why I love it.
I forgot it while doing the rest of the tutorial, but was reminded when we received the feedback from the tutorial entered by the audience.
The feedback was very good, but one can’t please all (if you are doing that, something is probably wrong…)
One attendant (I don’t know who, and it doesn’t matter) was very negative, and pointed out that when saying “if testing is easy, you’re doing something wrong” we were quite far from good, professional testers.
Now is the time to clarify what I mean, I still think some will disagree with me, but there could be interesting discussions about this (or unconstructive comments if the thoughts about Schools of Testing applies to us).

Testing is difficult
Testing is never complete. We are in the sampling business, and there will always be more tests you could run. This means that you always have to skip an enormous amount of tests that could be run. Many of them are easy to skip, but if you have many really good test ideas, at least I find it often difficult to choose which ones to skip. And after you are quite happy with your test coverage, things are changing. You learn about new things, the surrounding world changes, and suddenly your tests might not be the best anymore. And also, which tests should be run again? How much should your automation maintenence cost?
And cost is always a difficult thing in my experience. Striking the balance of testing cost and value of the information received is not easy, and it is easier to see when you are testing too little than too much.
We are also using serendipity to our advantage; it happens often, but is not predictable and difficult to rely on (but important anyway!)

Testers are humans and make mistakes
If you never make mistakes I am surprised. Mistakes can be small and big, sometimes they are realized and sometimes not. Sometimes mistakes help us find out other important information. There are many reasons for mistakes, but one of them is that we are dealing with complex things, both regarding technology and people. We don’t know everything in advance (if that was the case, testing wouldn’t be needed) and learning is personal, and sometimes “wrong”, but still helpful. Bugs I have missed often fall in the category of “I didn’t know about that”. If something is quite apparent, it could be called a mistake not learning about it, but there are so many things that could be interesting, and it is very difficult to know in advance.
We must also watch out for an environment where making mistakes is bad, because you can end up in situations where people don’t dare doing anything (new), and productivity, creativity, well-being and more disappears.
At the same time it is the humanity, the learning, the mistakes, the creativity that makes software testing important and extremely interesting!

Conclusion
These are reasons I use the “Thank God it’s not easy” heuristic.
If it feels too easy, I have not understood enough.

Of course this isn’t something unique for testing, it probably applies to most areas that deal with complexity and no clearcut answers.
And my thoughts are not new either, so now I have to read Staying with the Trouble by Donna J. Haraway.