3 Reasons To Celebrate World Tester’s Day and Software Testing
Today is World Tester’s Day and we’re excited to recognize software testers around the globe – especially those in the uTest community. Here are some reasons this day – and testers themselves – are worth celebrating.
1. World Tester’s Day has a great origin story.
In 1947, a team of scientists at Harvard University kept encountering problems with an electromechanical relay-based computer called the Mark II. On September 9, the source of the problem revealed itself: A moth trapped in one of the relays prevented the machine from carrying out its calculations.
Some accounts attribute the find to Grace Hopper and others point to William “Bill” Burke. Regardless of who found it, the offending insect wound up taped into the project’s log book with a note: “first actual case of a bug being found.” That’s how the term “debugging” became associated with computer defects. Today, the log book is part of the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, though it’s not currently on display
World Tester’s Day occurs annually on September 9, the anniversary of that first bug discovery.
2. Testers help make sure applications work properly, saving users time and frustration and protecting brands’ reputations.
Experts estimate that the cost of poor software quality in the U.S. has surpassed $2.41 trillion. Outages, bad data, failed APIs, and other seemingly small errors all add up when undetected or unaddressed. Testers offer the first line of defense against these failures.
Michael Bolton, software testing expert, consultant and author, summed up the value of testing in an episode of the Ready. Test. Go. podcast: “Finding problems in something, which is what really good testing helps to do, is the first step towards making things better. Not the only first step, but a really, really good first step, especially when we’ve got something that we have a belief is pretty good… its purpose, its role is an extremely positive one. We’re helping to prevent businesses and businesses’ clients from harm or loss or damage or bad feelings or diminished quality.”
Software QA calls for a different skill set and perspective than development. Kristin Jackvony, author of The Complete Software Tester: Concepts, Skills, and Strategies for High-Quality Testing, explained, “I really enjoy the exploration part of trying to figure out how a feature works and then thinking, what are some ways that I could test this? Or what are some edge cases that we might need to explore? And then thinking, are there any ways that I could break this?” While developers focus on creating features, Jackvony described her role as a tester as “more exploratory, figuring out how something works, figuring out all the ways that it might not work, and then trying those out.”
“Testers should always be skeptical, highly skeptical, because the difference between the testing role and the development role is the difference between the maker mindset, which the developers have, and the critic mindset, which testers need in order to be effective.”
Michael Bolton, software testing expert
3. Testers don’t just find errors: they uncover opportunities to improve the overall user experience.
An important part of testing is looking at software from an end-user perspective, including typical behavior, wants and needs. “If you’re not testing, you’re not really setting yourself on a path to growth. And I think experimentation and testing is very motivating. And it is very much about constant learning and research on a daily basis, based on data and what people actually do as opposed to what they say they do,” said Todd Unger, Chief Experience Officer and SVP Marketing and Member Experience at the American Medical Association.
Gary Larkin, Chief Strategy Officer of Marker Trax and Koin Mobile, pointed out that in highly competitive environments, seamless user experiences are paramount. “In today’s market, with incredible media clutter, with incredible competition for front-of-mind awareness for time… just simply getting people to want to click your app, use your whatever — there’s a lot going on there. It’s incredibly important to ensure you have solutioned the smoothest possible customer onboarding experience to your product. Is it easy for them to use? They don’t want to think. None of us do. We want to think about the things we like, but we want all the stuff that we get to just work… Make it faultless. Let the customer know they can rely upon it to work persistently over time, they’ll come back.” When organizations go beyond assessing whether software works to evaluate friction, ease of use and how users feel about an interaction, they position themselves to capture – and keep – more customers.
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Eliminating bias is a critical part of that effort. “Digital quality means creating systems that are inclusive, that are audited for bias, and are actually helping to make the world better,” said Meredith Broussard, Research Director at the NYU Alliance for Public Interest Technology.
In many cases, addressing bias and making digital experiences more inclusive calls for teams to rethink the ways they’ve done things in the past. “When we talk about today’s technology, we tend to talk about it as if it is sprung from the head of Zeus fully formed. It has not. It comes from many, many years of iterative development, and it builds on previous work. However, when you have a system like that, the sins of the past get embedded in systems unless you proactively kind of root them out,” Broussard explained.
Good testers can reveal flaws in a system that isn’t designed to effectively serve different populations. They’re trained to seek out blind spots – especially in AI applications. Whether they’re identifying accessibility issues, flagging that voice commands don’t work for users with certain accents, or calling out biased language, testers play an essential role in building more inclusive, seamless experiences.
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