Are test cases a 'Tester's BIBLE'...?

Once upon a time, there was a monastery in Tibet., there was a monk and had a lovely cat as a pet. One fine morning, when he was about to start his morning prayer, the cat, in a playful mood, was disturbing him. He asked his disciples to put the cat in the basket, finished his prayer peacefully, and asked the disciples to take the cat out of the basket. That’s it!

The disciples understood their Guru’s word. Everyday, one of the disciples will search for the cat before the Monk went for prayer, put it in the basket and took it out after the Monk was done with his prayer. The episode continued. Generations passed and the temple saw several generations of the Monk as well as the cat.

This tradition is still followed in the monastery even today. UNCHALLENGED. UNQUESTIONED.

One day, The Monk did not go for his morning prayer because his disciples " JUST COULDN'T FIND THE CAT"!

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From the Editor's desk:

This is a small story that can explain a lot of things in today's world like, Religions and beliefs etc....

Many of you would have read/heard this story and if you are still wondering , How is it related to testing????

Let me help you out with this:

Even in today's world - when you hear about software testing the first thing that comes in to peoples mind are the test cases, Requirements and other documents and matrices .

and (sadly) a majority of the software quality professionals still live by it, for them The best practices is the religion and 'The Testcases' ,their BIBLE, They just don't accept the fact that these documents are prepared by humans Hence failable...

In a company I previously worked, I happened to question credibility of the requirement and my comments were welcomed by sarcasms .Well I tried to explain what context driven approach was to those followers of best practices, but I still don't think it had made any change.

The main drawback i found in Best Practices is that , it is too time consuming:

Take the time you actually document the test scripts on the basis of the Requirements, Then you send it for review(another colleague will spend his valuable 2-3 working days trying to review and correct the mistakes that you have made in the test scripts) just think about the time you could dedicate to testing , if you just cut down the test cases.

When it comes to the execution I hardly find defects using the testcases, the fact is you tempt to skip a lot of scenarios while preparing the testcases, mostly negative just because you are in a hurry to finish your assignment.

Now bottom line is if you want to find valuable bugs you actually should use your tester instincts rather than relying one the requirements.