The Purpose of Testing

I have a strong passion for psychology and the social sciences and their connection to software testing. I currently have a few books on the go on these subjects and hope to write up my thoughts on these books and their connection to testing in the future within the blog.
For those that are interested the books I am currently reading (and re-reading – to make sure that things I assumed from within the books are correct) are:

• Qualitative Data Analysis A user friendly guide for social scientists - Ian Dey
• Thinking fast and slow – Daniel Kahneman
• Research Methods for Everyday Life – Scott W Vanderstoep

One interesting quote I found in the book by Ian Dey was the following:

Exploration, description and explanation are the three purposes of social science research.
Earl Babbie

Looking at this quote made me think about what the purposes of testing are and I came to the conclusion that this is the same as for social science research as quoted by Earl Babbie.

If we break this down we have:

• Exploration: This is done using exploratory testing, charters, missions etc
• Description – Let us describe what we are doing and what we have done when testing
• Explanation – Let us explain to managers, peers, stakeholders what we found when testing and our findings.

There are lots of articles, discussions, books about the purpose of testing and how very complex it is, this single sentence quote in my opinion sums up everything about the purpose of testing

I made a note to have a look at what Earl Babbie has got to say and found he has written lots of articles and books some of which could/may apply to software testing, it looks like I have added a few more books to my ever expanding reading list.