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You may have noticed that not many people know how the websites, software and apps they use everyday actually came into existence. They know that a developer built the app, but, as Lorinda Brandon mentioned in a recent column, the concept of software testing seems to leave them stumped. I’m not even a tester but I’ve noticed this lack of understanding whenever I tell people I work for a software testings company – they have no idea what that is or what we do. Once I explain it seems to make sense to them, but the overall concept of software testing just doesn’t seem to be in the main stream consciousness. Until now. As Lorinda pointed out in her column, the national discussion around the launch of healthcare.gov propelled testing and QA into the spotlight.
While several “software glitches” have been featured on the evening news, I can’t recall any that have caused a national conversation about the process of building and testing software until the Healthcare.gov debacle. Suddenly, Americans are sitting at their kitchen tables – in suburbs, in cities, on farms – and talking about quality issues with a website and who might be at fault.
The average American was given nightly tutorials on load testing and performance bottlenecks when the site first launched, then crumbled moments later. We talked about whether the requirements were well-defined and the project schedule reasonably laid out; we talked about who owns the decision to launch and whether they were keeping appropriate track of milestones and iterations. After that came the public discussions about security holes, which is not an unfamiliar concept to most people. But with those discussions came a healthy dose of encrypted passwords, third-party information sharing, and authentication protocols. School children and grandparents alike are worried about whether their passwords are being passed in the clear now. Imagine. There was even a major congressional hearing about the site, much of which focused on whether it was tested well enough.
It got really interesting when the media went from talking about the issues in the website to the process used to build the website. This is when software testers stepped out of the cube farm behind the coffee station and into the public limelight. Who were these people – and were they incompetent or mistreated? Did the project leaders not allocate enough time for testing? Did they allocate time for testing but not time to react to the testing outcome? Did the testers run inadequate tests? Were there not enough testers? Did they not speak up about the issues? If they did, were they not forceful enough?
So rejoice you software testers, QA specialists and quality evangelists – the world (or at least the US) now knows what you do!
