Testing to Make Product Better vs. Perfect

Reading Seth Godin’s post Perfect vs. important I realized that his idea is very relevant to testers. To rephrase, the main thought of his post is:

Spend more time on making something better (more useful) than polishing it to perfection

When it comes to testing, frequently testers jump into a habit of reporting every minor issue found which leads to quantity vs quality sometimes. Have you ever reported an ugly progress indicator or not the prettiest alignment of UI elements? I have. And I even fought for these to be fixed.

Obviously, UI is important. Distortion bug on IE9 can make you lose customers who use IE9, for example. Ugly UI is not inviting to be used. However, let’s stop for a minute – what is the actual importance of these issues for your product? Are they more important than a security bug where user can access different user’s account by changing their user id in the URL?

Sometimes we are wasting our energy, effort and even nerves with bugs which are for “polishing to perfection” rather than making the product better.

Think for a moment: what is the main purpose of the product?

The art of being a good tester is the ability to ask good questions, so let’s ask ourselves some questions when we test:

• Does the product work as expected?
• Are there any areas which may cause trouble and were not thoroughly tested?
• Does my testing concentrate on making product better or perfect?
• Do we (testing + other departments) have time to polish the product to perfection? (If yes – yay, there is time to fix minor issues as well!, if no – then concentrate on the important functionalities)

Sometimes you have to let go of the minor bugs – there are more important features to test/improve. Be smart with your priorities: work on making the product better, not perfect.