Tag: Twilight

I just love it when bloggers mix pop culture with testing. Recently, the Testy Redhead posted a few lessons about testing she adapted from her reading of the Twilight books. I love these books in all their somewhat-poorly-written-but-ultimately-addicting glory so I couldn’t help but put together a few lessons of my own. The last lesson is a spoiler, but I’m guessing that there are not hordes of Twi-hards reading this blog.

You can build a working car from a bunch of disparate parts.
Jacob totally rebuilds a Volkswagon Rabbit using parts that he collects over the length of a couple of the books. This reminds me of some of the great open source tools that are now available for testing such as Bugzilla and Selenium. It also reminds of the Automated System Test Framework I’m building from scratch at my job. I started out with a bunch of short scripts that I wrote, but, with some perserverance I’m close to having a system in place that will greatly assist me in testing.

Sometimes the yellow Porsche really is what you need.
I’ve noticed a real disdain for expensive tools among testers, but sometimes they are the right answer the same way the yellow Porsche was the right car for Bella and Alice in New Moon. When I started my testing job, I was not a tester and I did not know what I was doing. My tester friends in another group had shown me HP Quality Center, and I realized that I desperately needed this assistance with test case management. It helped me transition off of spreadsheets and gave me a structure for repeatable testing.

Don’t read the last one if you don’t want to read the spoiler.

Testers ARE the Shield
In the last book, Bella protects everyone using her special super power. Testers also have a super power, and that power is the right to say, “This product really stinks and is not ready to be released with our team’s name on it.” This is not the most obvious power, but it can protect a team or even a company from releasing a product and regretting it. I’ve had to say this before to a most “busy and important” developer who let me know how busy and important he was, but I knew that I was protecting consumers by saying it.