Check out what this tester at Microsoft has to say (http://weblogs.asp.net/chappell/archive/2004/06/03/147876.aspx):

Trying to improve software quality by increasing the amount of testing is like trying to lose weight by weighing yourself more…

The real value is in preventing bugs – especially regressions.

In your example, what business value have you provided?

The fact that you release software with a known set of bugs is fine – that is a part of risk/release management.

My main message is to focus on value-providing activites, as well as risk-mitigating activities. Sometimes finding bugs falls under risk-mitigation. However, since you never have enough resources to do everything possible, focus the resources you have better. Take a look at the whole project lifecycle – maybe you should be testing performance now, so that you’ll know that your design for all your features will be sound, rather than doing usability testing.

How important is finding a usability bug? Well, that depends on where you are in the project, and how important usability is right then.

Finally, sometimes I say contraversial things just to get people listening

Glad you liked it.

After digesting everything you said tough I came up being perplex with one thing. You said: “Finding bugs does not add value”. But isn’t knowing where your bugs are the central point of quality _management_ ?

I think it adds value when I warn my customers: “don’t hit this button right now it will cause a error! we’ll fix it on the next iteration”. Ratter then shipping without even knowing were the bugs are.

What’s your take on that ?