Top 5 Common Myths in Software Testing

1.  Software Testing is Monotonous/Boring

Testing can indeed be boring and feel like a mundane monotonous task if you are not doing it the right way! People opine that testing is boring because they believe testing is a repetition of similar tasks over and over again.
But if you are really an excellent tester, then you would surely think in a different direction. Think of testing as an information gathering activity done with intent of exploring and discovering answers and not just discovering flaws or bugs in the software. To achieve so, you would need to study, explore, observe, analyze, and use the software to be able to evaluate it.

2. A Tester Should Be Able To Test Everything

It is indeed a foolish notion that ‘testing can deliver a 100% bug free product’. The reasons of justifying this perception can be many — lack of enough time, lack of available infrastructure to test something, vastness of all permutation and combination that can exist etc.
Let’s take a very common and simple example from a blog – We all know that life critical systems like instruments used in medical facilities, airplanes, space ships etc go through a stringent set of testing procedure to ensure nothing goes wrong when they are operational. However, can the tester(s) testing a flight actually predict and test considering the actual air pressure, altitude, number of passengers and crews, total load on the flight, wind speed, temperature etc, on any particular day? Can their simulator simulate any random day’s environmental and other variables that the flight will have to take when in production?
Therefore it is an inherent quality of software testing that it can show that bugs exist, but not that bugs doesn’t exist.

3. Testers only find Bugs

Many freshers who start their career as a software tester have a common belief that their main objective is to discover lots of bugs in the software. Finding bugs in the software is an important part of what a tester should do. But, along with just finding bugs, testers do analyze the requirements, review the product architecture, provide ideas to make the product more user-friendly, validate the help documents and a lot of other things.

4.Testers Add No Value to the Software

There is absolutely no truth in this as it conveys that a tester’s role is strictly limited and adds no value to the product.
The tester analyzes and understands how the entire system works from end-to-end standpoint. Unlike the programmers who often spend most of their time working on a very specific area, function or component of the application, a skilled tester is often an expert of the system (product) under test. Testers get a better chance to demonstrate their understanding of the product in a way that adds value to the product.

5. Test Automation will make Human Testers obsolete

This is not possible from any aspect. Test automation can never replace human testers because testers have something that the test automation tools do not have- ‘Emotions’. For instance, a tool can tell us if the fonts, color and layout of a screen is as per the test script but it can never convey if the user will find that screen pleasant enough to use. The testers have this advantage over tools as being a human, they can relate to the likes/dislikes of the user. Testers can empathize!
Test automation tools are can actually be useful for testing certain aspects of testing (like large calculations, testing involving performance and load, repeated regression tests etc) that would otherwise be very time-consuming and hectic for a normal human tester. Hence, under certain contexts, automation tools can act as supplementary tools to aid human testers; NOT to replace them.
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