Testing and the Cassandra syndrome

What a stressful week!

We’re now a couple of days from formal User Acceptance Testing for our new product, and we have a limited 2 week window.

In an ideal world we’d have had an early version of the software to run preliminary tests on.  But there was only one machine available, and the priority was both to give this first to marketing and then to training because “testing wasn’t due to formally begin until a week later”.

This made for quite a frustrating experience, as I tried to explain to management the importance of testing getting an early look at it.  But I wasn’t really listened too – I was told as our window was so tight, it would “just have to work first time”.

It actually made me quite angry – this was project management by desperation, and flew in the face of everything I knew.  There would be defects I said, as in my experience projects always had defects.  It’s one of the fundamentals of testing “test early” but management were insisting on a rigid waterfall interpretation of “test at the end”.

My feeling of this is much like Sun Tzu who said that,


“a victorious army first obtains the conditions for victory, then seeks to do battle.”

Basically I interpret this as before you formally test, you test informally anyway to know the overall quality of your product and when if it’s ready.

In software there’s often a “can do” attitude of we can do anything.  Unfortunately this sometimes becomes as the above comment “we’re so stretched for time, it has to work first time”.  Everyone is optimistic it can be done.

This is where the Cassandra curse comes in.  Cassandra was an Oracle blessed with the power of divination.  But after a fall out with Apollo, she was cursed that her prophesies would never be believed.  And so she could see the future but was powerless to prevent the disaster she knew was coming.

This is something I think too many testers feel.  When many managers and developers feel “hey it’ll all work first time”, testers are all too experienced that often it doesn’t.  They know this because it’s their job to deal with things when they fail, and they’re expert at working the problems.  In all my development experience, I’ve only ever had one thing work first time (ironically it was also the most complicated thing I wrote, a search algorithm).

Problem is it’s hugely demotivating to be ignored or disbelieved when you try and warn a project there are problem ahead.

We finally managed our preliminary tests today – a couple of big issues, but a whole host of mediums one as well.  Perhaps too many to address in the time left.

But hey, that’s why they call me Cassandra ….