Introducing "Testing on the Toilet" (original) (raw)

Michael said...

I have a simple question as a former-programmer, now business guy, between dev and QA.

Why not put pay performance targets on both sides as incentives per testing release?

In other words, each QA person gets 10foreachbugtheyfind(upto10,orwhatever).Eachdevelopmentpersongets10 for each bug they find (up to 10, or whatever). Each development person gets 10foreachbugtheyfind(upto10,orwhatever).Eachdevelopmentpersongets10 for the number of bugs not found under a certain target (10, or whatever).

Seems like an easy way to get people more motivated about the whole testing process.

This is a horrible idea.

I will not improve quality. It will not improve relations between business, developers, and testers. In fact, it will make relations worse within the company and can lead to real bug escapes that impact customers.

This will only lead to finger pointing and time wasted chasing unimportant and duplicate "bugs".

As a tester, I have often had to make the decision about reporting a bug as one or 100,000. I don't know if the 100,000 errors my automated test found are due to 100,000 different problems in the code or just one. I could report them separately, or I could report them in groups, or I could pick up the phone and talk to a developer than could help me determine how the bug should be reported.

And what if the bug exists because a QA person did a poor job of reviewing the requirements? I could easily provide input to requirements that I know will lead to bugs just to get a bonus.

Not all bugs are due to a developer making a mistake in their piece of code. Some are due to bad requirements given to the developer. Some are due to bugs someone else created. If one developer's code does not properly interact with another developer's code, who is to blame? If the issue to bad documentation and requirements, do we blame QA?

And then we could argue about what is and what is not a bug.

There was a Dilbert cartoon many years ago about the idea of rewards for fixing bugs: Now, I'm going to code me a new minivan.