Software testing is an incredibly skilled profession that requires years of training and experience to reach the top of their game. Sometimes it’s the developers that take all the credit, yet software testers should be recognised for the hard task of making sure that a piece of software is ready to go to the consumer. To make sure that a program doesn’t fail due to bugs, it is imperative that every aspect of the software is tested.

There are many methods that software testers come up with new testing strategies, but one software tester by the name of Scott Barber believes that his children are a source of inspiration when it comes to testing software. As a father, he learned many valuable lessons from his kids and he managed to apply them to his software testing methodologies.

One of the key things that he talks about in his blog is the fact that children are naturally extremely curious beings. Kids are forever asking the question “why” and when you give them an answer, they usually respond with “why?” and this can continue for some time! However, he suggests that software testers are sometimes not as inquisitive as they should be. Perhaps they should ask why a piece of software performs a certain task. Is it supposed to do that? Does the customer want it to do that? If the answer is no, then perhaps you need to have a rethink.

Another of Barber’s very valid points is that software testers often ‘play by the rules’, in that they only perform the tests that they are told to perform. Kids are explorative by nature and if you give them a toy, it’s likely that at some point they’ll tear it apart to see what’s inside. The tester should adopt this attitude by really getting into the depths of the program to find out everything there is to know.

Another thing that is to be learnt from children is that you pretty much can’t determine every eventuality. Barber expands on this notion with an example of briefly leaving an application in the same room as one of his children. Upon his return, a series of keys had been pressed and the program crashed. The child had imposed a series of random events on the system and as such it failed.

Many businesses rely on performance testing in order to avoid catastrophe. Find out more online.