01 Checking and Testing Refined

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http://www.satisfice.com/blog/archives/856
Testing and Checking Refined


Tools encroach into every process they touch and tools change those processes. 
As Marshall McLuhan said “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”


We may witness how industrialization changes cabinet craftsmen into cabinet factories, and that may tempt us to speak of the changing role of the cabinet maker, but the cabinet factory worker is certainly not a mutated cabinet craftsman. The cabinet craftsmen are still out there– fewer of them, true– nowhere near a factory, turning out expensive and well-made cabinets.


 there now exists a vast marketplace for software products that are expected to be distributed and updated instantly.


We want to test a product very quickly. How do we do that? It’s tempting to say “Let’s make tools do it!” This puts enormous pressure on skilled software testers and those who craft tools for testers to use. Meanwhile, people who aren’t skilled software testers have visions of the industrialization of testing similar to those early cabinet factories. Yes, there have always been these pressures, to some degree. Now the drumbeat for “continuous deployment” has opened another front in that war.


We believe that skilled cognitive work is not factory work. That’s why it’s more important than ever to understand what testing is and how tools can support it.


For this reason, in the Rapid Software Testing methodology, we distinguish between aspects of the testing process that machines can do versus those that only skilled humans can do. We have done this linguistically by adapting the ordinary English word “checking” to refer to what tools can do. This is exactly parallel with the long established convention of distinguishing between “programming” and “compiling.” Programming is what human programmers do. Compiling is what a particular tool does for the programmer, even though what a compiler does might appear to be, technically, exactly what programmers do. Come to think of it, no one speaks of automated programming or manual programming. There is programming, and there is lots of other stuff done by tools. Once a tool is created to do that stuff, it is never called programming again.


Testing is the process of evaluating a product by learning about it through exploration and experimentation, which includes to some degree: questioning, study, modeling, observation, inference, etc.


(A test is an instance of testing.)


Checking is the process of making evaluations by applying algorithmic decision rules to specific observations of a product.


(A check is an instance of checking.)