How to Hire Good QA People for Web Applications

A veteran software manager recently gave me same valuable insights on finding highly productive and effective QA people.

These two questions reveal a great deal about someone’s mindset and approach to software testing:

1. How do you generate large amounts of test data?
2. What are the pitfalls of automated Web testing and how do you get around them?

Unfortunately, the people running many QA organizations don’t understand these things themselves and wonder why their automated testing efforts repeatedly fail. Those rare few who do and ’splain it to them are prone to get fired because it’s not safe to be smarter than the boss.Almost any programmer can tell you what you need to do to deep testing of a system: how to test each subsystem, how to generate meaningful test data that will really exercise the system, how to do positive and negative (no side effects) testing directly in the database vs. relying solely on what shows up on the screen, etc. In other words, the programmer knows more ways the system can (and can’t) fail because of their knowledge of how it works.

QA and Development should talk more often.

When Wishes Come into Conflict with Reality

“We don’t have time to do it the right way!” a software development manager recently told me, “because we have to deal with the reality of a looming deadline.” (Never mind that doing it the right way would allow us to do it only ONCE, thus conserving time down the road. And never mind that doing it the right way will result in higher quality, which always saves time).

I expect to hear this old fallacy from some project managers and client representatives, but not from a development manager. What is the fallacy? As far as the actual software completion date is concerned, deadlines are WISHES, not reality. The actual completion date cannot be known with absolute certainty in advance. That is REALITY. I once had the pleasure of working with an IT Director J.P. Besong, who articulated the fundamental truth of software projects that still seems to elude most software project managers:

When wishes come into conflict with reality, reality wins.

/dmc