Testing with cockroaches in your head
Working as a QA, I often heard the voice in my head “have I checked everything for sure?” and sometimes it can be useful, but if you don't learn to use the voice and shut it up, it starts to do harm. Below I will tell you about this alarming cockroach and how it manifests itself.
During work, many situations arise that give everyone a unique experience. In this article, I want to share my experience and the knowledge I gained from it. I hope my words will be useful to some extent. In any case, I will be glad to receive comments and hope that they will help me see myself from the outside and become better.
Pros of the cockroach “have you checked everything?”
He does not allow even simple and trivial tasks to be treated lightly.
Once it happened that after moving from one task to another and having already completed testing, I, just in case, decided to check whether I had tested everything and noticed one small detail – the task did not have a formula for the calculation that the new function did. After rereading the task and the epic, I realized that the formula for the new calculation was not indicated anywhere. So how did I calculate it?
It's embarrassing to admit, but I calculated and checked the calculation using a formula from another task, which, although related to the current one, they were independent. I requested the calculation rules, rechecked the task and it turned out that the developer, just like me, applied a formula from another task for calculations in this one.
Tarakashka allows you to find non-trivial bugs and make the product more reliable
After going through the testing plan, this little cockroach starts throwing up ideas like “what if the client has an enlarged font or an outdated operating system?”
Thanks to him, I can better describe the tests I've completed, and also add videos and screenshots.
And it helps a lot when testing is finished, the feature is on production and suddenly some bug appears. After identifying and fixing it, I check whether I missed this bug or it appeared already on production. Sometimes it happens that when I open screenshots and records I see this bug. Then I start thinking about why I didn’t pay attention and why it wasn’t checked.
On that introspective note, let's move on to the negative aspects of this voice.
It makes me anxious and often for no reason.
This sometimes happens after fuckups, but there are situations when the cockroach's voice sounds without any reason. There were situations when the cockroach did not leave me alone even after I went to bed and then I made notes to myself about what else should be checked.
Often it makes you waste time on very complicated cases.
And this is a direct continuation of the first point: because of anxiety, the strangest and most nightmarish scenarios are born in the head, which at the moment seem very important, but in reality turn out to be something like “a thrush whistled in a pine tree under the moon…”
It doesn't allow you to focus on other tasks.
Sometimes, having already transferred a task to the next status and having chosen what to do next, thoughts about cases haunt and prevent you from focusing on the new task. In such cases, it can be difficult to switch from the anxious cockroach-checker
How to use this cockroach to your advantage and how to contain it?
First,
What came to mind when I wrote down the negative points and what I repeat like a mantra: Exhaustive testing is impossible – there will always be bugs.
It is impossible to predict all possible combinations and all available situations, which means it is impossible to find all the bugs before the user finds them.
Especially in a constantly changing world.
You just have to accept it and live through it.
What helped me understand this was analyzing the causes of bugs in production, or as they are sometimes called postmortems: when you communicate with each participant in the process to understand how the bug arose and what can be done to avoid repeating the same mistake.
Serious defects often arose due to simple carelessness: somewhere they didn’t check cases with empty values and because of this some of the products in the store didn’t open, somewhere they forgot about localization and the title on the screen was empty.
And the world did not collapse because of this, people continued to work and paid attention to those places where they had once made a mistake.
Second,
what I used to calm the cockroach-checker is the design test technique: the decision table and the transition and state diagram.
They help to visualize the application logic and better see possible cases, which means being more confident that these cases will not be missed.
If anyone has forgotten, a decision table is a table where we enter conditions and rules in columns and columns. After specifying options for all conditions and rules, we fill in the expected result. You can read more here https://habr.com/ru/articles/546 432/
A state transition scheme is when we have an object, it has states, and the object changes its state under certain conditions. It is not always suitable. It helped me a lot when I was developing an accounting service and the object in such schemes was a report, application, or electronic digital signature.
Third
The cure for the cockroach found me itself. It turned out to be a review of test cases from colleagues during testing and communication after fuckups.
Simple, banal, but works great.
Four
The efficiency and risk assessment became calming. When the cockroach started whispering in my ear “check a few more cases” I remembered the team leader and asked 2 questions:
how long will it take?
what will be the profit?
what is the probability that this will fire?
Yes, sometimes it makes sense to test on multiple OS versions, with different language settings, dark and light themes, larger fonts, and so on, but more often than not, these tests are unnecessary.
Imagine that when performing such checks you found a bug: what priority would it be? Due to the specifics of reproduction, even a crash can get a minor priority.
How long will these checks take? 5-10 minutes is not terrible, but they are not always available. In this time, you can read the description of the average task
Conclusion, I guess
Like any tool, a cockroach can be useful or harmful. Often, the ability to apply and use something comes with experience and time. I would like this article to help you reduce the time it takes to tame a cockroach, save your nerves and believe in yourself more.
I hope this article will encourage you and instead of confrontation and a fight to exhaustion, you will find your approach to this formidable beast and tame it.
