I don’t have any hard numbers to support this, but one thing I have noticed in the past (and now as the result of what I am working on) is that attitude you bring into a testing session largely determines how effective your testing is going to be.

Here are two attitudes I know I have had when testing. There may be more..

  1. Please let it work – This attitude creeps in towards the end of cycles where bugs are more dangerous to the ship date. The risk here is that if you are going through something asking it to please work and it does, then you might miss something else because you were focusing so much on the other thing. The perfect example occured last night during an emergency deployment window. I verified the two major defects were no longer an issue in production and did our ‘standard’ sanity run. I however didn’t click the Logout button. Turns out, that the production button goes to the staging resource. Oops.
  2. There is a bug in here – This attitude is a double edged sword. When you are on a deep regression, you want to be meticulous. The bugs are there, you just need to dig hard enough. If can be abused though. If you feel that something should not be released, but management decides otherwise, then this can be used to hunt for a different issue which can be used to achieve your own nefarious goals. (Not that I have spent 10 minutes just staring at a screen thinking of all the sneaky things I could do to it. Nope. Not me….)

Don’t get me wrong. They can both achieve their goals, but you really want to identify when you are heading into this particular deep-end and swim back to shore a bit. Your developers are not morons (in most cases), so the code should work. Praying isn’t required. And your job as a QA professional is to provide information to people who make the tough decisions. As long as the information was provided, then you are safe.

(See, I am learning)