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copied!<p>Certainly unit testing, whether test-first or not, should be your first line of defense, ensuring that each piece of your application works the way you think it should. However, the type of testing you're talking about, where it can be helpful to get another pair of eyes, is more in the area of acceptance tests -- does the application as a whole work the way it should; does it work for various weird scenarios or behaviors, etc.</p> <p>One helpful approach is to imagine personas: first test the application as yourself, but then test it again imagining that you are 85 years old, can't see terribly well, and don't use a mouse that well. You may tend to click on the brightest or largest thing, assuming it's what you're supposed to do, which it may not be. Now imagine you're 12 and in a tearing hurry. No way are you going to read instructions. Does it still work?</p> <p>For any given field, what are the edge cases of what a person might type in? What happens if you type only spaces? Only numbers into a textual field? What happens if you type HTML? Javascript? Something in a non-western alphabet? What if you type something really really long?</p> <p>The key is not just to test the "happy path", where the user goes through the application the way you had in mind. Go through the application in ways no one ever should. Because... they will.</p> <p>The other important piece is never to ignore anything. It's easy to have a weird screen come up and say to yourself "Oh, that's just a fluke." You have to make yourself notice and track down everything that isn't just as it should be.</p>

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