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started hands-on testing immediately, and found some nice bugs. The development team happily fixed these bugs, and gave Tester 1 a fresh version of the software to test. More testing, more bugs, more fixes.
Tester 1 felt productive, and was happy—at least for a while.
After several rounds of this find-and-fix cycle, he became bored and bleary-eyed from running virtually the same tests over and over again by hand. When Tester 1 finally ran out of enthusiasm— and then out of patience—the software was declared “ready to ship.” Customers found it too buggy and bought the competitor’s product.

started testing by hand, but soon decided it made more sense to create test scripts that would perform the keystrokes automatically. After carefully figuring out tests that would exercise useful parts of the software, Tester 2 recorded the actions in scripts. These scripts soon numbered in the hundreds. At the push of a button, the scripts would spring to life and run the software through its paces. Tester 2 felt clever, and was happy—at least for a while.

The scripts required a lot of maintenance when the software changed. He spent weeks arguing with developers to stop changing the software because it broke the automated tests. Eventually, the scripts required so much maintenance that there was little time left to do testing. When the software was released, customers found lots of bugs that the scripts didn’t cover. They stopped buying the product and decided to wait for version 2.0.

didn’t want to maintain hundreds of automated test scripts. She wrote a test program that went around randomly clicking and pushing buttons in the application. This “random” test program was hypnotic to watch, and it found a lot of crashing bugs.
Tester 3 enjoyed uncovering such dramatic defects,
and was happy—at least for a while. Since the random test program could only find bugs that crashed the application, Tester 3 still had to do a lot of hands-on testing, getting bored and bleary-eyed in the process. Customers found so many functional bugs in the software when it was released that they lost trust in the company and stopped buying its software.

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