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A Good Software Testing Culture Can be Easily Broken
Lessons learned from Google’s “$100 billion error” yesterday.
This article is one of the Stories series.
Google’s “$100 billion error” made the news headlines yesterday.
Let’s see the official statement from Google:
“This highlights the importance of a rigorous testing process, something that we’re kicking off this week with our Trusted Tester program,” a Google spokesperson told CNN in a statement Wednesday about the factual error. “We’ll combine external feedback with our own internal testing to make sure Bard’s responses meet a high bar for quality, safety and groundedness in real-world information.” — CNN news
The two keywords here are “Quality” and “Important”. But wait, I remembered one quote from the “How Google Test Software” book.
The “$100 billion error” is just the opposite example of this quote in the book “How Google Tests Software”, don’t you agree?
I searched “Alberto Savoia” and “Patrick Copeland” (both wrote the forward of the book, and Patrick Copeland was the top of the food chain for Google’s QA Engineering, reporting directly to Larry Page, the CEO and co-founder) on LinkedIn, and both left Google (in 2012 and 2016).
This shows that a good testing culture can easily be neglected and broken after key people leave the company. Sooner or later, “YOU HAVE TO PAY FOR IT!”
Over my consulting/coaching, I have seen this repeatedly. Let me share a story.
Many years ago, after I rescued one software project and set up a daily automated End-to-End (via UI) regression testing process (1 BuildWise CT server with three mac mini build agents, running 148…
