Testing is the most important part of any kind of software development methodology, but it is also the most neglected one. Nowadays, when an organisation does testing, it produces such a high amount of waste that the whole development process becomes very expensive, which makes it harder to win projects over the competition and risks the existing relationship with the customer.
When an organisation follows Lean thinking, then it is capable of finding and eliminating waste through Kaizen, which means more output with fewer resources: less expenses and more revenue.
Lean thinking does not bother with testing and technical details, it just gives you the idea and approach, the rest depends on you, and how you implement it. In this post, I’m going to share how I would find and eliminate waste created during testing.
There are different kinds of waste (you can read more about them here), but first let’s have a look at their consequences on the level of the organisation: wasting money, losing trust and revenue.
Most of the organisations work like this:
This is a quite common structure. A large company (the customer) outsources some work to a start-up company (the organisation), and provides services to somebody else (the external customer). The same roles appear at large multinational companies as well, where the organisation may be a division inside the large company.
Before going any further it is very important to clarify the two processes of testing:
- Verification: what I implemented is working
- Validation: I implemented what the customer wanted
Without giving any spoilers on the upcoming paragraphs, I can tell you that in nine cases out of ten, the root cause of the testing-related problem is the misuse of these processes.