34 Years in Testing

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2021-05-24 20:00:05

This past Friday, May 21st, 2021, was exactly 34 years since my first day at Apple Computer as a tester. Before that I was a dev, but I have been a tester ever since. This has put me in a retrospective mood.

The industry has gone through changes, yes, but it seems to me there has been a constant throughout my entire time observing this field: almost everyone in the software world thinks they understand testing, yet almost no one makes an effort to study it. Testing was not taken seriously in the 80’s, even though there were a lot of people called testers and money was being spent on it. For the most part, testing is not taken seriously today, either. It is the fashion, today, to say “quality and testing is everyone’s job!” (and then treat that as license to do testing in a shallow and amateurish fashion).

When I joined the craft, the dominant idea was to formalize testing by writing procedures, then automate those procedures if you can. It was thought that testing specialists were needed to create those procedures and to operate the automation. We had test teams and test managers. Testers were always under pressure because everyone except testers wanted to ship the product ASAP.