Testing. The very word can send shivers down my spine. In the sports realm, it means finding out who’s the fastest, strongest, most agile – and no one likes to be the slowest, weakest, or least agile. In school, it can mean a variety of things. It can mean a big exam that students spend hours, days even, preparing for. Other times it could mean an unpleasant surprise for students, intending to find out who has been diligent with their reading and who has not.
With all this prior experience with testing, I didn’t know how to react to the handful of threats thrown at me to test GroupSwim. First of all, I had no idea how I could possibly test GroupSwim. Would it entail testing GroupSwim or testing my own performance on GroupSwim?
Then I heard talks of finding and filing “bugs.” What could this possibly mean? I knew there weren’t insects crawling through the Internet, so was GroupSwim sick? I later realized that “bugs” were defects in the system that are fixed by re-writing the respective html. Is this what I would be testing? How would I find these “bugs”? The very idea that there could be bugs on GroupSwim baffles me. All the websites I visit seem to function easily and quickly – in fact, I would be upset if they didn’t. So does this mean that every website has a team of programmers constantly filing and fixing bugs? I guess you learn something new everyday.
In the end, testing was like a finger prick. Anxiety built up in anticipation of finding out what testing was, just like how it builds up between the time the doctor tells you you need a finger prick and when the nurse walks in with the stick and band aid. But then afterwards, it was like “that’s it?” Naturally, it was very tough to find any bugs in GroupSwim since it is such excellent software;)
