Page - 199 - in The Future of Software Quality Assurance

The Future of Testing 199 Mostprobablyformost testers2008justwentbylikeeveryotheryear.However, it has been quite an important period for the profession. Testing became more about involving people instead of endlessly scrutinizing the different documents and making it a sport to file as many bugs as possible in some bug tracking tool. From 2008 onwards, testers (and other people in the IT work field) slowly started embracing the agile methodology.After spendingyearsand yearsmakingsoftware testing into a serious, but especially an independent,professionall of a sudden, the professionstartedmovingback to itsorigins.Because in the1980s(andalsobefore that) software testingwasn’tconsideredaspecialist jobatall.Asoftwaredeveloper wrote some software, tested it and went on with the development. As long as the system didn’t crash and seemed to be doing what it was supposed to be doing it must be workingas intended.With the introductionof Agile, SCRUM and later on things like DevOps, testing went back frombeinga strictly independentspecialism to something that’s part of the entire software developmentprocess. Looking back at it youmay say the professionof software testing had lost its way for a decadeor twoandfromaround2008onwards it has found itspurposeagain.Software testing isn’t about finding bugs. It isn’t about being independentand having a developer’s heart in a jar on the desk. It’s about working together to create the best possible software. Software quality isn’t about finding out what’s wrong with the software (compared to what was written down in a functional design document). It’s about the software meeting the wishes and demands of the person who will be using the software, the end-user. Instead of being this separate testing department spitting out bugs, software testers became part of the development teams. This also meant more and more software testers actually did get the heart of a developer . . . Until ca.2008it was said software testers toleratedboredomwhiledevelopersautomated it. When developers and testers started working together it turned out there wasn’t anyneedtokeeprepeating thesamemanual testing tasksoverandover.Theycould be automated! And many testers embraced this, they no longer needed to tolerate boredom!Tomanyitmust’veseemedliketestautomationwasbornaround2008,in reality test automation isasoldas softwaredevelopment itself. Itwas just forgotten (bymost) foraperiodof time . . . 3 Present Day We can’t imagine a world without the internet anymore. Smart phones are part of everyday life and it’s hard to even start comparing software development with what it was back in 1998. Hardly any IT project is done without at least some elements of the Agile way of working and things like DevOps and Continuous Development and Continuous Integration are now becoming commonplace. Words like communication and teamwork are (almost) considered being magic words in the world of software development nowadays. So, what have we learned from the past, implemented in our present and what can it tell about our software testing future?