Rex Black

People, regardless of where they are, are not widgets. They want responsibility. They want respect. They want to be valued. They want us to be interested in developing their skills and their careers, even if they work for a third-party contractor. They want feedback.

The most dangerous kind of wrong is the kind of wrong that sounds reasonable, as I've said elsewhere in this book.

Categories of tests that make sense to outsource include the following:

Tests that would cause a short-term spike in test manpower requirements, followed by downtime or layoffs
Tests that cover a broad range of hardware and software, or otherwise use expensive or difficult-to-maintain infrastructures
Tests that are routine and unglamorous, but important to shipping a quality product
Large blocks of tests that might not get done in-house due to changing priorities

Categories of tests that make sense to run using in-house test teams include the following:

Tests that result from last-minute changes in requirements
Tests and test result evaluations that require sophisticated domain knowledge
Tests that provide a competitive advantage in terms of evaluating and improving product quality
Tests that are time-critical and vital to project success, or that are subject to rapidly evolving requirements
Tests that establish system stability prior to release to a testing service provider for final testing

As you start to see testing from a management perspective, you'll also start to see that testing is, to paraphrase Winston Churchill's comment about democracy, the worst possible form of ensuring quality in computer products, except for all the others.

Well, yes, I did say that quality is free, but only in the long run. Since we're talking economics, the dismal science, I'll quote John Maynard Keynes, who said that, “in the long run, we're all dead.”

you have to do your testing with the test budget you have, not the test budget you wish you had.

In the opening sentence of his novel Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy says that “all happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” In commenting on this passage, the historian Paul Johnson disagrees, retorting that the sources of unhappiness in families—alcoholism, infidelity, violence, poverty—are tiresome and common and lead to tiresome, common, and sad results.7 The commonality of problems is great news, though, because the commonality of the afflictions allows common approaches to alleviating them.

When you sell change, don't talk about your pain. Talk about their pain—and how better testing and higher quality can make it go away. People move away from pain much faster than they move towards idealized situations, especially when those situations don't provide immediate benefits.

As part of this process, the following conditions should be met:

All software is under revision control.
All test builds come from revision-controlled code.
Consistent, clear release naming nomenclatures exist for each major system.
A regular, planned release schedule exists and is followed.
A well-understood, correct integration strategy is developed and followed during the test planning stages.