Projects, testing programs, and testers often fall into commonly occurring testing pitfalls that make testing unnecessarily less effective at uncovering defects, less efficient in terms of testing resources, and more frustrating to testing stakeholders. Based on the experience of many testers, we have developed a taxonomy of 127 common testing pitfalls organized into 18 categories. Each pitfall has been analyzed and documented in terms of title, identifier, description, potential applicability, characteristic symptoms, potential negative consequences, potential causes, recommendations, and related pitfalls. The first 92 pitfalls were documented in the book
Common System and Software Testing Pitfalls: How to Prevent and Mitigate Them. Since the book manuscript was baselined for publication, a further 35 pitfalls and four pitfall categories have been identified, analyzed, and documented.
It is our intent that they form the industry de facto standard taxonomy of testing pitfalls and will be widely used for the following:
- Training materials for testers and testing stakeholders
- Standard terminology regarding commonly occurring testing pitfalls
- Checklists for use when producing test plans and related documentation; evaluating contractor proposals, test plans and related documentation (quality control), and as-performed test process (quality assurance); and identifying test-related risks and their mitigation approaches
- Categorization of pitfalls for metrics collection
