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Days 21-23 2022: Truth In Software Testing


The Truth And Nothing But The Truth


Friday I had my brain melted by a 5 and bit hour Zoom meeting. We were attempting to do a full end to end walkthrough of the process/Application we are testing. To use a theatre term is was a "Dress Rehearsal" for next week when we get the business users to do the same thing. It took that long because the application is still riddled with bugs. As well the bugs there as many environmental issues. At almost every point of the process, there are problems. There was aghast team leads on the call who had never seen the application in full flow. The reality of what we have to do to get it to work left them shocked.

Our team lead joked with us that they were not allowed to use certain phrases. Phrases like "Environmental Issues" or "Application Issues." are best avoided when they are talking to the business stakeholders. It got me thinking about how progress gets reported in Software Development. A lot of the time managers it is often trying to sing a tune the Stakeholders wants to hear. All the Stakeholders want to hear is the crafted pop song. The reality? A producer has spent a night feeding the singer's tuneless voice through an Auto-tuner. Everything is great till that singer has to go on stage and sing it live*. (* there are some rumours to get around this certain artists use backing tapes even live)

I have never been in senior management, so I have never had to do the song and dance routine for the stakeholders. I understand that sometimes there may be a need to "parse" reality now and again. I have been on a couple of projects where this parsing has gotten to be the norm and it starts to warp reality.

Truth and Transparency should be at the base of any Software Development. Bending the truth only hurts the project later, and is not good for the people working on that project. Bring the stakeholders in early as possible and show them the reality. You will get a better project that way.


What are your thoughts and experiences?
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