IMO, production testing and "exploratory" testing are complementary, but incompatible activities. Production testing is the thing that a few people in the community denigrate as "checking," as they turn up their noses and deprecatingly sniff. 1/9
That’s the thing that tells you that the program actually works and is shippable. IMO, that process must be fully automated and integrated into your CI/CD pipeline. 2/9
It must be possible to check-in-test-and-release with an automated, and very fast, indivisible process that in no way involves human hands. IMO, production tests of this sort are created by the dev team, ideally as part of the TDD process, & checked in along with the code. 3/9
Testing of this sort is a skill, not a job title, and is tightly integrated into development. There is no separate testing org, or even "testers" on the team. It’s all part of dev. 4/9
Of course, for this to work, the team must work collaboratively, ideally as an ensemble, but at least with code reviews so that more than one pair of eyes is on the code at all times. 5/9
The second activity called "testing" is manual "exploratory" testing. I see this as more of a discovery process—an entirely separate process than development that’s more like product work—that happens on the side, in parallel to development. 6/9
Putting this sort of manual testing into the "value stream"—as a requirement for release—introduces waterfall phased gates with the concomitant delays and bottlenecks. It’s a destroyer of agility, and a huge antipattern. As an activity separate from dev, though? Sure. 7/9
If a bug is found in exploratory testing, it’s essential to immediately create an automated test for that bug and get it into your CI/CD pipeline. But, truth to tell, if a bug is found at this stage, I’d argue that your dev process needs work. 8/9
Frankly, I think it’s muddying the waters to call both of these activities "testing." I’d call the manual stuff "exploration" and the production-related stuff "testing." Calling testing "checking" fails to grasp the concept of CI/CD, and agility for that matter. 9/9
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