The zombie apocalypse has occurred. They walk among us even now — The Testing Dead. These dead-eyed, soulless creatures make sounds that seem human, but they’re an empty shell inside and will bite you if provoked. Left unchecked, Zombie Testers will infect an organization with their disease. Zombie testing is any rote application of testing practice or methodology without regard for how appropriate it is in that context. It often looks like one or more ‘skilled’ testers churning out test cases for meatbot automatons to execute, but there are no doubt those who identify with context driven methodologies who have missed the point and follow the same go-to patterns regardless of context.
While there is some amount of tongue-in-cheek in this analogy, it does describe actual patterns of dysfunction that I’ve observed. I want to be clear at this point that I’m having a go at a kind of behavior. I’m not trying to demonize people.
There are a number of different flavours of Zombie. See if you recognize any of them.
The Misled
These are the ones who finished whatever secondary or tertiary education they did and decided they were done learning for the rest of their life and could they please have a job where they could memorize and regurgitate the right answers like they did in school. Not particularly adventurous, they might have found some of the large amounts of crap online about software testing and decided that was just fine thanks. Give me a recipe to follow or a template to fill out, but the dark gods forbid I should have to think for myself.
The Template Weenie
A variant of the Misled. They discovered some testing templates online or perhaps their company had some already put together. Their belief is that if they fill out these templates and no gaps are left, then good testing will have been done. If they’ve got all the requirements covered and tests all trace back to them, and the test plan is all filled out and the schedule is set properly, then we’re all good. It appears that for them, reality is an obstacle to be managed with paperwork.
The Passenger
The passenger has fallen into testing but has no desire to be there. They have no desire to be a tester, but are using testing as a bridge to somewhere ‘better’ (typically programming, business analysis or project management). They tend to do only enough work to avoid reprimand and will often be found hanging around the group they’re trying to break into as though they might be absorbed by osmosis.
I generally try and cut a deal with passengers should I encounter them. It is in our combined best interests to move them on, so I promise them I will do everything in my power to get them where they want to go if they agree to be the best tester they can be while they are with me. If they have a strong body of work I can show the manager of the group they want to transition to, and I can honestly talk about the strength of their efforts, then that tends to lend great credibility to their application. Sometimes that approach works, sometimes not. If they won’t let you help them to get where they’re going, you may wish to help them out the door instead.
The Apathetic
Similarly to the passenger, these zombies have no real desire to get better at testing, they simply want to turn up between 0900–1700, go home, rinse and repeat. They won’t think about or do testing in their spare time, it is merely a job. To some degree there’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but personally I’d rather work with inspired, passionate people that genuinely enjoy what they do and want to do it better.
In some respects having a few apathetic zombies around can make your life easier — they tend to be the ones who enjoy predictable monotony and there’s often no shortage of that in testing. If you have repetitive work that is difficult to automate, these people can be handy.
The Confused
This lot think they’re doing Quality Assurance when what they’re doing is testing. Quality assurance is really a collection of roles and actions that have a direct bearing on the quality of the product, such as the hiring/firing of programmers, architects etc, Decision making about what to include or what to leave out, which design to go with, which vendor to go with and so on. In contrast, software testers reveal information about the product. Some testers write production code, but in their role as a tester, they do not directly influence the product itself. The Confused either do not get this, or vehemently believe that their role is to be the final bastion of quality before the software goes out into the world.
They tend to enjoy grandiose titles such as ‘Quality Assurance Engineer’ despite not doing quality assurance and not being an engineer. They also seem to actively position themselves as the gatekeepers of the software release decision, apparently blissfully unaware that it’s a lose/lose situation for someone with the word ‘quality’ in their title to be attached to. If they say no to a release, they’re either overridden by the people with real power (and who probably have a better business sense of what needs to occur), or they’re seen as the ones holding everything up. If a release goes out and something screws up in production, they’re the ones who get fingers pointed at them and asked questions like ‘Why did you let that bug out?’
I’ve seen on testing forums questions like ‘We had some bugs go to production. My manager is asking me why. Can someone give me some excuses I can tell them?’ Wow, just wow. The level of non-comprehension about one’s own job that this question requires is mind boggling.
The sadness doesn’t end there though. Not only do the confused make their own life hard, but they like to make life harder for their non-testing peers also. Things like testing entry and exit criteria, based on arbitrary bug counts of varying severity (e.g. no more than 1 severity 1 bug and 5 severity 2) tend to make people’s life unnecessarily difficult.
The Priest
A variant on the confused, these guys perform ritual testing. It’s testing theatre in much the same way that the TSA do airport security theatre. It may find some stuff, it may not. It gets applied to everything in the same way because that’s how it has to be done. It’s their religion. This is the way testing must be, for this is the one true way of testing. I’m not sure, but they may be an evolution of the template weenie, like some mutant fucking pokemon. Fortunately I haven’t encountered too many of these.
The Horde
The horde probably resembles their traditional zombie counterpart more closely than any other zombie type. Although they are a large group, They share nothing more than proximity and brain death. A website (or app or other software) will be left out in the open like a sacrificial virgin. The horde descends upon this website under the guise of crowdsourced testing whereupon individuals compete with the rest of the group in order to find something vaguely bug shaped upon the surface, like little zombie rhesus monkeys.They are paid by the bug, so when you take their bug away from them well, have you ever tried taking food away from a rhesus monkey? It’s a bit like that.
They are largely incapable of following instructions unless said instructions are very, very precise. Instead, these zombies have specific go-to patterns they use to find bugs, such as turning on Internet Explorer’s ‘bitch about everything javascript related’ mode. They will also report every single instance of the same bug despite the fact that they clearly have a single, common root cause. Their bug reports are somewhere between readable and atrocious because it doesn’t matter what quality the bug report is, it just has to be first. Once they have exhausted their suite of patterns, they will immediately leave the victim, generally unmolested but quite free of lice or other surface irritants.
There are no doubt more types of Zombie out there, but these are the ones I have encountered on my travels. There seems to be a common thread amongst zombie testers — the complete lack of desire to do anything differently to how they are doing it now. In a role that demands that we rapidly respond to a frequently changing environment, that seems antithetical to how a tester should operate.
In the next post I’ll talk about why zombie testing is a problem for thinking testers and what we can do about it.
Originally published at http://testjutsu.com on August 8, 2012.
