Testing Is an Activity. Or Is It?

by Nataliia Vasylyna | August 1, 2016 9:11 am

Lately there has been a lot of talk about whether software testing [1]can be considered as an activity or not.

Perhaps the correct answer is that testing is not actually an activity, it is rather a combination of multiple activities. In a software testing company, each team member is to some extent responsible for the overall quality of a product. Therefore, each person is engaged in some particular testing activities. Each activity demands specific skills and way of thinking.

How Are Testing Activities Typically Distributed among Different Specialists?

• Testers often participate in a multitude of different testing activities. Among them are exploratory testing[2], load and stress testing, installation testing [3]and a variety of others.
• Programmers create and run integration and unit tests, review the code, fix errors. All these tasks can be considered as testing activities.
• There is a relatively new profession called ‘Software development engineer in test’. This specialist is directly engaged in testing and performs such activities as creating and running automation scripts and suites, working with automation frameworks, etc.
• Other team members may also be engaged in testing activities. For example, support team often makes a substantial contribution to the project’s quality assurance process.

Keep in mind that although each team member is in charge of quality, each of them performs only specific testing activities related to their particular occupation.

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Source URL: https://blog.qatestlab.com/2016/08/01/software-testing-activity/

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