Testing Goals

Today I learned a simple yet thought-provoking question to ask when determining your testing strategy: “what errors are we hoping to catch?”

A colleague with a deep background in automated test writing asked me this question while I was sharing a new test approach with him. When I commented on the quality of the question, he said that he asks it to learn if the tests are actually valuable.

It is a version of a question a previous director taught me to ask when contemplating a new feature: “what problem are we solving?”