Measurement In Software Testing Is Important But Hard

One of the hardest questions that software testers should answer is How much testing have we completed, and how well have we done it? [Cem Kaner, J.D., Ph.D.. http://kaner.com/] The post is aligned with the Black Box Software Testing Foundations course (BBST) designed by Rebecca Fiedler, Cem Kaner, and James Bach.

I managed to solve the broken Add Media button. One of the installed plugins caused trouble. I did the following:

• Disable all plugins
• Enable only Disable Gutenberg editor plugin (I do not like Gutenberg editor)
• Add Media works
• I enabled only the plugins that I use (clean WordPress plugins)
• Add Media still works.

WordPress plugins are free, but it seems that plugin developers do no test plugins on new WordPress versions (I understand them because they need time and money).

Back to measurements in software testing.

All metrics questions in software testing are traditional ones. That means that involve quantity:

How MUCH testing have you done (somebody is counting test cases)?

How thorough has our testing been?

How effective has our testing been?

Are we meeting our information objectives? Do we need to change our testing strategy?

How much testing is enough?

Are we done yet?

These are important and hard questions. So far, we introduced you to topics that could help you to answer those questions. But we also must introduce you to the reasons why popular, simplistic measurements often can not help you.

The main reason is that we can not measure quality, we can only asses it [Bach]. We have quality aspects that can not be measured in popular simplistic ways.

Product quality is not seven meters high.

Originally published at https://blog.tentamen.eu on March 24, 2020.