The Testing Blog

Fear of Success

Posted on May 3, 2010. Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: quality, testing |

by Josh Carroll

I was in the middle of making a rather lengthy comment on Daniel’s most recent blog post when I decided it was long enough to warrant a full posting.

I wanted to get across the point that the situation Daniel finds himself in is not solely the plight of the software tester. Rather, anyone who esteems software quality runs the risk of being criticized, dismissed, or made fun of. Why is it that organizations and groups are so resistant to something that will improve their process, their product, and their bottom line. The idea is one I have been thinking a lot about, and I believe I have had an epiphany.

Sometimes, people are more afraid of success than failure!

Wait… what did you say?!? You heard right, and I’ll say it again. Sometimes, people are more afraid of success than failure.

I recently gave a presentation where I cited the Microsoft study on TDD that found:

The results of the case studies indicate that the pre-release defect density of the four products decreased between 40% and 90% relative to similar projects that did not use the TDD practice. Subjectively, the teams experienced a 15–35% increase in initial development time after adopting TDD.

The idea that up to 90% of your test and fix cycles can be eliminated represents an enormous cost savings even if you factor in the high end estimate of 35% increase in initial development time. You will more than make that time up by not having to fix the 90% of bugs that are now gone from the system. With numbers like that you would think that management would be breaking people’s knuckles for not using TDD. Developer’s would be falling over themselves to TDD even the smallest spec of code just to avoid doing maintenance (curse the ground that software maintenance walks on).

But alas, there was no stampede. No rush to go forth and test. No proclamation from management that it must be so. So… what gives?

What gives is that it might just work! Developers might just write cleaner code, and be more productive. Testers might be able to confirm code quickly and have the freedom to explore automated acceptance testing. Deadlines might be met, and the company might save money. And… and… we might have to admit that we have been doing it all wrong for a very long time.

And there it is; the big white elephant in the room of software quality. Not fear of failure, but fear of success. Because success means having to admit things can and should be better. Even worse, that they could have been better all along. And we don’t like that. Most of us like to think we are pretty smart, that we are pretty damn good at what we do. When someone shows us a better way, our little bubble bursts, and we are forced to admit that we aren’t as special as we’d like to think we are.

The mediocre will always defend the status quo because their sense of worth is derived from being the smartest, funniest, sexiest, whateverist person around. They are a big fish in a little pond, and they like it that way.

The exceptional are never satisfied with the quality of their own work. They assume that there must be a better way, and seek out the best and brightest in the world to learn from. They draw their sense of worth from knowing they are better today than they were yesterday.

Exceptionalism is the arch-enemy of mediocrity, and success is it’s kryptonite!

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