TL;DR

Here I would like to comment statement from the blog post, Can Tests Cause Bugs? By Gregory Paciga where he states that tests are a safety system to prevent production bugs.

Let set the context of this post. Greg considers for test a scripted test, or code. Here is heuristics:

If tests are a safety system put in place to prevent production bugs, and safety systems can cause the problems they are put in place to avoid, can tests themselves cause bugs?

(Sidenote: Pedants will be quick to jump on the fact that testing doesn’t “prevent” bugs; I’m going to ignore those people.)

As he put in the sidenote that comments about bug prevention, I wrote this blog post 🙂

When we consider scripts (or better put automation code) a production safety net, we consider only to catch the regression bugs. This makes our net very narrow. Here is my reasoning why the test is not a safety net:

• Testing is an activity, not a scripted code that repeats the same thing over and over.
• Software testing is an empirical, technical investigation conducted to provide stakeholders with information about the quality of software products (What Is Software Testing?)

By stating to your team that testing is a safety net is very dangerous. You actually claim the product quality ownership, and we explained in Testers Are Not Quality Gatekeepers why this is not true.