Summary

It's time again to remind you of the four reasons for carefully planning your test cases: organization, repeatability, tracking, and proof of testing. These can't be stressed enough because it's very easy to become lazy and neglect a very important part of a tester's jobto document exactly what you do.

You wouldn't want to drive a car that was designed and tested by an engineering team that scribbled their work on the back of a cocktail napkin or lived next to a nuclear power plant where the control software was tested by a team of ad hoc testers. You would want the engineers who built and tested those systems to use good engineering practices, to document their work, and to make sure that they did what they originally planned.

As a new tester, you may not have control over what level of planning and documentation your project is using, but you should work to make your job as efficient as possible. Find out what's necessary and what's not, investigate ways to use technology to improve the process, but never cut corners. That's the difference between a professional and a hack.

This chapter and Chapter 17 dealt with planning and documenting what you intend to test. The next two chapters will cover how to document the results of your testing and how to tell the world that you found a bug.