How Safe is Your Testing Environment?

This was the theme of the Tauranga Software Test Professionals Meetup held on Wednesday 11^th February and hosted by the great team at Mercury NZ. A confronting topic and situation, we elected to have the session as a round table discussion and not our traditional speaker type format. We also agreed as a team to conduct the whole of the session under the Chatham House Rule – so the details of the discussion will not be shared. The session started with an overview and background of the UK Post Office Scandal – a very sobering example of what *has* happened when the testing community is not able to freely disclose the truth of the state of the software.

What we can disclose was:

• Software Test Professionals are still being removed from projects where, as the messenger, they are communicating results that project leads and steering committees don’t want to hear.
• There are still examples of amber and red project situations being represented as green at the Project Steering Group.
• There are organisations and projects that give Software Test Professionals a voice – and that voice is listened to
  • Software Test Professionals do need to state the current state as facts and not represent opinions.
• The existence of Defect Management and Test Management platforms within a Test Practice is a key enabler for safe and effective disclosure on system, quality status. Key risk areas are those organisations that lack this – or use systems that are provisioned and maintained by the external vendor providing the system.
• Amongst the Software Test Professional community there is agreement that their role is to communicate on the factual state of the system under test in terms of quality state - *not* to be the decision maker on the system being released into production.

As part of the round table, there was discussion on the role of the Software Test Professional being one of the ethical whistleblower. There was a follow-on discussion around the existence of organisational systems to support effective, safe and anonymous disclosure of true state when the project or organisation is preventing the true state being disclosed. It was interesting to hear about those organisations that did provide this – and how this was done.

A question for you the reader: How safe is the Software Test Professional role within your project / organisation when it comes to reporting the true state of system quality? As a Software Test Professional or as a Project / Programme Lead, what is being done to provide a safe and supportive environment for this disclosure?

Needing to shift the tone of the meetup, we did finish with the results of our annual survey on the Software Testing environment in the local community. The survey results are available here <Link to Presentation PDF>. With the rise of the use of AI, the annual survey has been amended to ask on the use of AI in Testing and the Testing of AI based systems. The results may surprise you – check them out……

Our next Tauranga Test Professionals meetup is set for June 2026. Our topic – presentations from those using AI in their test practice. Registration invites will be sent out soon.