Software Testing and the Impact on Quality

My response to a question on Reddit.

“Software quality does not come from testing”
Does anybody have any thoughts on the validity of the above statement?

That statement is similar to the idea you can’t inspect in quality. Basically “Inspection is too late. The quality, good or bad, is already in the product.” W. Edwards Deming

I agree with those ideas. Software testing is a bit different (at least some of it is) from the inspection mentioned above. You are testing while the product is being developed and adjustments are being made before the product is released to customers. Also with internet based software you have the ability to update the software and now all users have that update. Where for physical devices they already have the product and the only option is a recall which is very expensive and often ignored.

Software testing however should pay attention to those points in the 2 links above (defects should be understood as evidence of a process that needs to be improved so defects are not built in the first place). What you want is not just to fix the bugs software testers catch but figure out the reasons those bugs were created and improve you process so you create fewer bugs in the future.

No matter what the software quality is based on the code that is written. At the best software testing can tell people about the bugs but unless the code is fixed the software quality didn’t change. But to say that software testing doesn’t have a big influence of software quality when testing is well done and the software development process is good (listens to feedback and improves) is not very accurate.

Related: Improving Software Development with Automated TestsCombinatorial Testing for SoftwareBuilding a Great Software Development TeamDeming and Software DevelopmentThe Defect Black Market

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2 Responses to Software Testing and the Impact on Quality

  1. Yuen-Chi Lian says:

    > What you want is not just to fix the bugs software testers catch but figure out the reasons those bugs were created and improve you process so you create fewer bugs in the future.

    Totally!

    Many understood QC/QA job purely as inspection of the quality of output, esp. in an environment where developers throw their code over the wall to testers.

    At my work, people from the “Quality Chapter” are developers with an additional responsibility: champion of quality, not just on the output (product) but the processes, and ultimately drive productivity of the entire system.

  2. Pingback: Interviews on Software Testing | Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog

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