A sea of green test checks tells you nothing about actual risk. Instead of reporting pass rates and test counts, talk about what testing can't guarantee and what gaps remain. Stakeholders make better decisions when they understand the real uncertainties.
I've always tried to focus my energy and language on business risk. And so when you talk about that and then you've got some other testers are just talking about pass/fail ratios and test case counts and, you know, that's all these weird metrics that we produce, which are proxies for something else and they can't explain what the proxy is, you know, that's just, they just glaze, I glaze over at those, you know what I mean? You can't translate it into something that's tangible for somebody who's responsible for the business, cares about. So when you have those conversations, yeah, they actually work. That whole testing, checking, you know, debate, Man, that really changed my approach on how to describe what the value in test automation is, what it can and can't do. And it frames it in a way that you can understand the limitations so that when you see a sea of green checks, we wanna understand, well, what didn't it cover? Where should we be uncertain? What are the risks of that going wrong? As opposed to just looking at it and saying, yeah, we ran, you know, 10,000 tests on this thing, they're all green. Well, who cares? You know, like, why does that matter? And I think when, yeah, when you actually frame the debate that way, they do listen.
