Beauty in Testing

My favorite test magazine had a guest editor for last month's issue. He picked an excerpt from his book on beautiful testing for one of the articles. I guess when you are the boss, you can give yourself a competitive advantage. Let's see what this guy had to say about the beauty in testing.

You got to know who you are testing for. You must know your stakeholders. Otherwise you cannot please them. This can be anybody from developers to managers to support staff to users. Many of these people could have unrealistic expectations of your work. Get used to it.

It can be hard to impress the stakeholders. They want more than you finding a lot of bugs. Developers may want you to do the opposite. Metrics can help you quantify your success. I just want testers to find problems early so we can fix them on the cheap.