Aggressive and Passive Testing

March 22 07:00 2011 by Nataliia Vasylyna Print This Article

I’ve been thinking about how I *bucket* testing. Here is what I mean. I see testing as aggressive and passive.

Aggressive testing, to me, is the art of asking the product questions, to think outside of the box (and the text-book) and to try different ways to test the application looking for interesting information (whether they be bugs, issues or curios). I prefer to be an aggressive tester. My mindset is to look for ways in which a product could fail. I see this as our value add as testers. When we find a bug, the bug is reported and resolved in *someway* thereby helping increase the quality of the product.

I believe that, while there is an element of passive testing (and what i mean here is checking), a tester is more beneficial to a project IF they are being aggressive and proactive and looking for potential failures or issues.

Detailed testing scripting can be *aggressive* in some ways but I’ve found that by having a pre-determined course of action, I am more likely to allow confirmation bias to influence the way I work. By exploring (and I mean having some structure – whether it is by session based test management or using high level test conditions/risks/ideas), I have found that I am more likely to be more aggressive in nature and pursue lurking bugs in the code as I have not been constrained by following detailed test steps.

I believe that to be an effective tester ultimately means that we are aware of the context of the project, application and environment, we are in pursuit of information (bugs, issues or curios – curio *term* taken from a discussion on twitter from James Bach and Michael Bolton) and we are feeding this information back into the project thereby helping management make more of an informed go/no go decision.

In one project I worked on there was a significant element of what i call Passive testing which came in the form of *running* a regression suite. This involved executing a test script which quickly devolved in an almost meaningless tick off and check exercise (check the test step – is it correct? – If so, check it off, if not do a superficial investigation (though I can state that no regression bugs were *found* as a result of this *testing*!)

This is bad passive testing which unfortunately is common in my part of the testing world. How many times have I seen disengaged *testers* running scripts that supposedly are meant to add value to the project – to my sceptical mind, all they add is paper.

Now, not all passive testing is as I’ve described. Even when we are aggressive in our approach there may still be elements of passive testing (checking against rules, contracts, laws, configurations, environments or anything that may require checks that help support what we do as engaged testers).

Aggressive and passive testing are NOT mutually exclusive – they are interdependent and intertwined – the issue I have is when the passive (non-engaged) testing is more prevalent than the engaged (by being engaged I mean brain switched on testing).

Unfortunately this is common in bigger organisations where I live. Fortunately, there are pockets of very engaged, context driven testers around that add much more value than the stock standard factory schoolers. I am thankful for that for it means that I’m not a lone voice in this part of the world!

New terminology?

Am i introducing a new set of terminology? No. Will others view testing as aggressive or passive? Maybe not. What I am doing is highlighting how I see testing. There is nothing wrong with that. I am not constrained by a glossary (though they could be useful) rather I am attempting to demonstrate what i mean by testing and how I view the craft that I work in.

Source: http://bjosman.wordpress.com