For anyone who is interested in reading the original article (by Brian Marick), this is the link.
This is the original list of classic testing mistakes:
The role of testing
· Thinking the testing team is responsible for assuring quality.
· Thinking that the purpose of testing is to find bugs.
· Not finding the important bugs.
· Not reporting usability problems.
· No focus on an estimate of quality (and on the quality of that estimate).
· Reporting bug data without putting it into context.
· Starting testing too late (bug detection, not bug reduction)
Planning the complete testing effort
· A testing effort biased toward functional testing.
· Underemphasizing configuration testing.
· Putting stress and load testing off to the last minute.
· Not testing the documentation
· Not testing installation procedures.
· An overreliance on beta testing.
· Finishing one testing task before moving on to the next.
· Failing to correctly identify risky areas.
· Sticking stubbornly to the test plan.
Personnel issues
· Using testing as a transitional job for new programmers.
· Recruiting testers from the ranks of failed programmers.
· Testers are not domain experts.
· Not seeking candidates from the customer service staff or technical writing staff.
· Insisting that testers be able to program.
· A testing team that lacks diversity.
· A physical separation between developers and testers.
· Believing that programmers can’t test their own code.
· Programmers are neither trained nor motivated to test.
The tester at work
· Paying more attention to running tests than to designing them.
· Unreviewed test designs.
· Being too specific about test inputs and procedures.
· Not noticing and exploring “irrelevant” oddities.
· Checking that the product does what it’s supposed to do, but not that it doesn’t do
what it isn’t supposed to do.
· Test suites that are understandable only by their owners.
· Testing only through the user-visible interface.
· Poor bug reporting.
· Adding only regression tests when bugs are found.
· Failing to take notes for the next testing effort.
Test automation
· Attempting to automate all tests.
· Expecting to rerun manual tests.
· Using GUI capture/replay tools to reduce test creation cost.
· Expecting regression tests to find a high proportion of new bugs.
Code coverage
· Embracing code coverage with the devotion that only simple numbers can inspire.
· Removing tests from a regression test suite just because they don’t add coverage.
· Using coverage as a performance goal for testers.
· Abandoning coverage entirely.
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