Lean Software Development – Post #9

Now, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit, by Tom Poppendieck and Mary Poppendieck, is a great book.
Still, the authors don’t seem to have grasped the essence of testing. In Chapter 6 (Build Integrity In), for example, they say that “In software development, we also test that design intent is achieved and that the system does what customers want it to do. When developers write code, there should be a test to be sure that each feature works as intended and that all of the pieces work together.”

In my view, this is a quite reductionist approach to testing.
Verifying that the system does what it is intended to do is actually the easiest part of testing, whereas challenging the system —to make sure it doesn’t do what it is not supposed to do, to figure out how it handles unexpected conditions, to identify risks, etc.— is definitely the most interesting and powerful part of testing.

All in all, I look forward to reading more books written by Tom and Mary Poppendieck to see if they eventually manage to come up with a better definition of testing.
I really hope so!