A Positive View of Negative Testing

Negative testing is a core skill of experienced testers, and requires an opportunist, exploratory approach to get the best value from the time spent. It can find significant failures and produce invaluable strategic information about the risk model underlying testing, and allow overall confidence in the quality of the system. Negative testing is open-ended and hard to plan granularly. It needs to be managed proactively rather than over planned. Although negative testing is a powerful and effective approach, it is also a hard-to-manage task that has the potential to produce unwelcome information. In this paper, James Lyndsay explains the value of using this testing method.