Personally, I love to relate different aspects from other areas to my life as a software professional. Today the aunt of my wife celebrated a birthday, and I got the opportunity to overhear a discussion between my father-in-law and an uncle from my wife, who are both truck drivers. Since I read Secrets of a buccaneer-scholar, I became aware of combining different areas of my life together to learn something new.

Now, German laws demand high discipline from drivers on the road – especially truck drivers. There are given rest times for truck drivers, regulated by the local police officer. These laws evolved over time, to protect innocent truck drivers and other traffic participants from fatal injuries caused by drivers with too few sleep. There are other regulations that protect trucks from getting off-track, especially on the German Autobahn, where truck speeds of 100 km/h are usual – and cars drive with as much as double this speed.

So, working as a truck driver puts a certain challenge on you. You want to deliver your wares to the destination and hit back home. Your boss wants to deliver the wares to the promised date. Traffic jams, alternative routes, and other variables may put the predetermined schedule from your boss at stake. Today
I learned that it is common that the boss will then ask the drivers to skip their rest times.

But wait, what has this to do with software development? Well, if there are delayed deliveries from third-parties, shortcuts to requirements and/or design, among other variables, your project will be put on pressure. The predetermined project plan may become out of date. As the truck drivers’ boss, your project manager may ask to skip testing.

So, what is different in the truck driving part of this analogy is the fact that there is a police checking for too long driving periods. The German law then enforces penalties to the truck driver for giving in to the demand from their boss, so they may even lose their drivers license in extreme situations.

Seriously, I doubt that most projects would deliver untested software, if there was a project police in place, that would charge penalties from developers and even project managers for skipping testing. Sure, an overtired truck driver may deliver their goods on time in 90% of the cases, but if he just naps in front of the steering wheel once, and ends up in a massive traffic accident, the results will be dramatically fatal. The same may as well go for some software projects. However, avoid to give in the temptation to say “my project won’t cause fatal accidents, if I skip testing.”

If you didn’t get my main point, I would like to finally point you out to a fable about testing from Gerald M. Weinberg. His granddaughter Camille got the point from it at the age of four, can you get it, too?