Targets - Testing and Stress !!!

This is something which has been pinching me day and night. Most of the days when I woke in morning more than the horrors of news of rape and politics harassing me, what was harassing me more is the injustice I face and see in my day to day professional life.
That used to make me very tensed – that something so wrong is going on under my face and I don’t have any rights or convincing powers to make it right. And daily I used to curse me to the core. I think that’s one of the reason I started growing bald J, since its said that the more you take stress more you get balder. I think that’s the reason I then started to just let it go rather than fighting for it.
But finally I thought to at-least express myself a bit.

Injustice of accepting ABSOLUTELY wrong things, injustice of not speaking back to people who feel they have all rights to just speak anything to me.

QUALITY TARGETS - Don’t you think that the term itself is incorrect? Since every version we are given quality targets that for; this big task quality target is to have these many test cases. But that is basically a guideline. And if we don’t reach that target there are too many questions asked to make someone understand that it is correct. Can a guideline be a target? Doesn’t it sound strange?

To an extent I think it is required as well, since how can a delivery manager know whether the testing has been done correctly or not. Eventually he is responsible for a good delivery. The reason he cannot trust is because every time there is a new version, he sees new faces from development. And no one trust a stranger unless that stranger becomes your friend.
So after development comes the testing phase. System test comes with another set of targets and fancy graphs and figures.

These days development period is less important and hence less time given to it than testing (relatively).
Don’t start getting me wrong here, since system test is a very important part of development life cycle, but FOR SURE not important than development and development testing (i.e. Unit Testing).

Now since system testing is done by another team – there needs to be some means for their survival. Hence they are given their survival dose of number of defects. But mind you the number of defects to be considered needs to be CLOSED and not CANCELLED (Answered). Since if it gets cancelled, then their ability gets into question.
And if it needs to be marked CLOSED (FIXED) then development abilities gets questioned. So with this inequalities starts a bad relation between development and testing teams. Aren’t these teams supposed to work so as to make product work efficiently and correctly?

Eventually so much of energy gets wasted in this fight that sometimes people just want to even bang the other person (Its still good that we are considered educated* people), else you don’t know that in WAR rooms (name given to room where ST is supposed to sit with development for quick resolutions) people come carrying AK-47s.

But the end result is that most of the times development and testing teams just don’t like each other and the poor systems just sits watching these two guys. Sometimes it enjoys watching them talk very silly things and sometimes it pities itself saying that guys the amount of money you are wasting within yourselves, if you would waste or rather invest on me. Then I would bring you 5 times more money to you. But poor development and testing teams they cant see the future.
They are also not exactly connected to it, since after 3-6 months they will be allotted to another project. So they care about themselves and the poor system .

And during the next version one of the two stays. Mostly the development and the system test is yet another guy. So if system test guy comes with a fresh outlook and thinking about future. He is dragged down from his idealistic thinking and is made to realize that boss your existence is based on your targets and not on your good behavior with the systems/product or other teams.

These days in newspaper, internet…. I hear a lot that software professionals live in a huge amount of stress. Is the stress because of real work or because of unwanted work (NAMED as WASTE).

So what can be done to reduce this stress?
1. Lets not have defects?
2. Lets not have any targets?

NO – that would be a blunder.
I feel what is required is an understanding.
Understanding that quality targets is not a target – but a guideline.
Understanding that a cancelled defect is not wrong – rather it was an effort to check that a functionality is really working. At times it is used to solve a doubt (which eventually helps the tester) or it used to reconfirm that another functionality is solved with the fix of another defect (Duplicate Defect).

Use of defects needs to be only for the purpose of tracking that a fix gets tested and for developers to analyze later-on as how he can improve next time.
Some might think that, that’s exactly is the purpose – but mind you in reality that’s not what happens. There is always a gap between reality and on paper. But when the gap increases beyond a limit, it worth it.


With this I leave it upto you to think as whether you want to get into this so-called rat-race of targets or to rise above it and raise the bar.

Would love to see comments from you.