I am not a clicking monkey

There are things from time to time that make me take a stance for testing. Not necessarily at work, as I am blessed to work at a place where testing is valued. But when talking to people who are more into development or management, I sometimes encounter opinions I strongly oppose.

And just to let off some steam, here some of these:

Testers are just clicking monkeys

Seriously? If you have testers who are just clicking along the lines of a given test case, you are in deep trouble, anyway. First of all, who will write the test cases then? Developers? Or do you split between test case writers and test case executioners? To exaggerate a bit: wouldn’t that be like letting car mechanics define traffic rules? Doesn’t seem to be a good way of working to me.  And more important, why don’t implement automatic checking, so that your testers can go and explore what is beyond the predefined path?

Money is an important part of the definition of bugs

Seriously, when did that happen and why did no one tell me? There are quite some books, articles, blog posts on bugs. All have (slightly) different definitions of bugs and I guess everyone has an innate understanding of what a bug is (certainly depending on the testing school you are from, but that is a totally different topic). But no definition I know of is concerned about the fixing costs. And the opinion I encountered was along the lines that bugs are only bugs if they are cheap in fixing. If it is expensive, it is supposed to be a new requirement or change request. Sorry, but a bug is a bug. How you deal with it in terms of fixing is a totally different thing. Yes, I have been on projects where complicated and complex bug fixing was paid by the development budget not a maintenance budget, but still it is and will be a bug, regardless how you bill it.

Bug severity is related to the remaining days until release

This is actually more of a behavior than of an opinion, but fits in rather nicely. Additionally, it is actually a point that I understand somewhat. Of course people (actual users in this case) want those bugs fixed that bother them. But why are they more bothersome the closer you get to release date? You can’t tell me that the same bug needs a bigger work around today than yesterday, just because it is one day closer to release date.