“It’s ready for testing”

What do you mean by a developer if he says “It’s ready for testing”? Let me clarify this by adding some more words in it. If there is a conversation between a developer and a tester which ends with the statement “It’s ready for testing”, what does that mean?

There are three possible answers for this.

1. It’s ready for testing and the tester doesn’t know what needs to be tested but the developer is aware that what he has implemented and what needs to be tested.
2. It’s ready for testing and neither developer nor tester aware of what are the functionalities that needs to be tested.
3. It’s ready for testing and the tester knows each and everything about what needs to be tested.

Sometimes, I have seen that the developer himself is not enthusiastically releasing the build to the testing team. I believe this is the situation when the development itself is not clear about what they have developed. This becomes one of the most difficult situations for the testing team since they have to test the application without knowing what to test.

Sometimes, there are examples where development team tries to hide the things that they have developed keeping this fear in mind that testers can find some bugs in it. In this scenario, there is a huge understanding gap between the developers and testers.

Please note that in both the above two scenarios, there is nothing as such called system requirements documents or software requirements specifications. If that will be the case, no need to discuss the above scenarios as everybody will be clear about what needs to be tested or what needs to be implemented.

The best and the only feasible condition for a better testing is that tester should know what needs to be tested. Although this task is not an easy one for a tester but this can be achieved with a great enthusiasm and management support. So better to ask for

• approved system requirements documents
• approved software requirements specifications
• release description documents
• Unit test cases results

Communication plays a major role to achieve the only feasible condition that has been mentioned above. Remember management will not consider the issues that you have faced while testing. Management only knows the matrix and a bad matrix with so much number of bugs filed by customer will create a bad image for the test team and a good matrix with so much number of bugs filed by the testing team will create a good image for the test team.

-- Sanat Sharma