Recipes – how to do hard things

One client we worked with had test cases stored in a test case management system. With that software, you could pick one project, get a list of test cases, and then get details about those test cases. For any release, you could create a “test run,” and for every test run, you could mark the cases as passed or failed. By the time Matt arrived at the client, they were using an ancient client/server system whose version had just run out of support. The next version of the software would require a budget to upgrade. The operating system of the server was too old, so that would need to be upgraded, and the hardware was underpowered and out of date. Management performed a bulk export to Excel, threw the old test cases onto a network drive, and threw the test case management system away.

Nobody noticed.

To say that no one noticed might be a slight exaggeration. From time to time, someone on the team would be testing a particularly...