Re: [gentoo-dev] Automatic testing on Gentoo

[Chris Richards <gizmo@giz-works.com>]

On 05/10/2011 03:13 PM, Jorge Manuel B. S. Vicetto wrote:
> So, why "more testing"? For starters, more *automatic* testing. Then
> more testing as reports from testing can help greatly in identifying
> when things break and why they break. As someone that looks over the
> automatic stage building for amd64 and x86, and that has to talk to
> teams / developers when things break, having more, more in depth and
> regular automatic testing would help my (releng) job.
While I agree whole-heartedly with the sentiment being expressed here, I 
just want to point out and remind everyone that automated testing is no 
substitute for real live people using (and breaking) things.  People are 
remarkably inventive and creative when it comes to finding ways to break 
things in ways that the developers never even considered.

All I'm trying to say is that I've seen (and worked on) far too many 
teams in the past that fell into the trap of thinking automated testing 
was sufficient.  It isn't, but it certainly goes a long way towards 
helping make the manual tester's lives better, by letting them focus on 
finding those problems that aren't (for one reason or another) 
reproducible in an automated testing scenario.

Later,
Chris