First off,
I know this question sounds like an "Interview question" style, but bringing up this question to find an correct answer for an interview question is not my intention.
As tester, we don't have all the time in the world to do the testing, we need to know when to stop testing without affecting the quality of release.
I'm interested in your thoughts on this matter…When you stop testing? and How you stop it?
I welcome all ideas both in serious and humorous ways 😀
In humorous way: when we are feeling boring. Repeat the test day by day and issues still not fixed and we cant find anymore issue.
In serious way (interview style): as ISTQB says that, testing is never end and never enough. We will stop testing when get and pass criteria as agreed by customer or we can confident to release and very sure that there is no critical bug escapes to production.
In some of my worked projects, sometimes the management tried to hide bugs to gain the pass criteria percent and get them fixed later in next release. 🙂
@Tri,
Great points.
I do agree with what you said.
Re: “…sometimes the management tried to hide bugs to gain the pass criteria percent and get them fixed later in next release. :)”
> You hit the nail on the head!. That’s exactly the problem with metric. We can change the number as we wish and if we can’t change the number, we tweak the output to match the number.
Go back to question when to stop testing, I can think of some cases when I stop testing:
1) Release schedule is more important than the risk of un-tested areas
2) We test enough (this is tricky ;))
3) There are more important thing to do than testing
4) My boss of my boss of my boss told me to stop
5) Budget for testing has run out
6) When I didn’t love testing anymore or I was fired 😉
Cheers,
Ideally, you don’t stop testing until you run out of one of the three pillars (Time, Money, Resources).
In practice, it’s usually the time or the money that run out or that you can predict that will run out, so you have to maximize the effectiveness of your testing time. In rare cases where you have enough time and budget to continue, you will want to stop testing when all the parties that are involved have the sense that the quality is good enough. This means at the very least the developer, the tester, the project manager and the customer.