Evaluating Risk
The one thing a tester has to be able to do is to correctly evaluate risk. This can be done when choosing the priority or severity of a defect or to a Test Manager having to decide how to correctly decide what defects are going to be added or removed from a deployment during the triage stage.
The reason for the picture on the left is that Pigs kill people each year than sharks do. An interesting fact that is not very widely known.
So it’s strange that more people fear sharks. Its this fear that messes with our ability to correctly evaluate risk.
I had a conversation about the shark/pig statistics above with a work colleague and their reply was that they ” had never heard of a pig killing on the news yet they had heard of shark kills on the news”.
This sort of proved my point. News is exactly that a rare event that happens. We don’t hear that over 60 million people go about their daily lives each day in the UK without any major events happening, however when a stabbing or a shooting happens then it makes the news because its a very rare event. We also on average spend more time of our lives in waters where sharks frequent than we do on farms.
People should realise that if something happens that makes the news then usually, they don’t need to worry about it. By definition, ‘news’ means that it hardly ever happens. If a risk is in the news, then it’s probably not worth worrying about. When something is no longer reported—automobile deaths, domestic violence—when it’s so common that it’s not news, then you should start worrying.
