📛 Common terminology misses in software testing

Created by microsoft copilot using DALL.E 3

I posted about this topic on LinkedIn and saw a lot of engagement. Somehow I have this eerie feeling that I’ll be pointing people to this blog in the future as well 🔮

1. It’s not automation testing, it’s automated testing - We are not testing automation, we are automating tests
2. It’s not QA Automation, it’s just Test automation or better Automation In Testing (AIT) - we cannot fully automate quality assurance, it is a broad term and some activities will require human intuition, we can automate tests to give faster feedback at scale.
3. It’s not a QA Automation engineer, call them SDET or Test engineer please, and yes people with these titles both write automated tests but there are differences, read this
4. QA Engineer is not the same as SDET, again there is a difference 😉 - read blog in point 3 for more details
5. Flaky tests are not the same as broken tests, there is a difference 😉 - Broken tests are nice as they fail all the time, but flaky tests? not so much, sometimes they pass, sometimes they fail, but they always point to a nice problem underneath to debug, don’t ignore them, and don’t retry them 5 times.
6. Assertions and checks are mostly the same! I rest my case!
7. Quality engineering is loosely the same as QA Engineering as a term to refer to the organization - dropping assurance does not make much difference. Leadership does implicit conversion anyway and applies their old biases. Calling it Test engineering is more explicit
8. QA is a process, it’s not an engineer - Would you refer a person with something abstract? Probably not. Calling them testers is much better and more explicit. 🙏
9. 100% automation, really? - your energy is much better focussed on ROI (return on investment) driven automation. The Pareto principle exists for a reason. Chasing vanity metrics just leads to unnecessary suboptimal waste

Your mileage may vary. We can refer to the same thing with different labels and that’s completely okay

Did I just stir up a hornet’s nest? 🫣
I’ve learned to not care about these much but occasionally push some buttons and I prefer some over the other. I thought I’d just put it out there.

Thanks for the time you spent reading this 🙌. If you found this post helpful, please subscribe to the substack newsletter and follow my YouTube channel (@automationhacks) for more such insights in Software Testing and Automation. Until next time 👋, Happy Testing 🕵🏻 and Learning! 🌱

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