Once upon a time there was this company who struggled with a poorly built system. Every day the users got more and more annoyed on the bad interface. One day enough was enough and the kind boss asked a prominent consultant to build them a new system. The developer consultant arrived with his shiny laptop and started working. It was not long before the consultant started to struggle. The environment and business logic turned out to be a lot more complex than he predicted and none from the company side could give him any straight answers on how things should work. After many weeks of swift coding the system was ready for the users to test. And once again the consultant was faced with the users’ unavailability.

It was time to call in a tester. The humble tester arrives and is quickly introduced to the system and the users. Only two weeks left until deployment and no tests run, the tester decided to use the users as testers. One by one the users were booked for an hour each. The tester arrives to the meeting with a few bullets that needs to be tested and tell the users to use real data when testing. The users slowly start to familiarize themselves with the system and a lot of feedback is recorded by the tester.

The developer is happy to finally receive feedback.

The kind boss is happy the quality will be improved.

The users are happy that their opinions are raised.

The tester is happy that the system has been tested, the users introduced to the system through coaching and that everyone now seems comforted that this new system will save their day.

I doubt 200 test cases could have done a better job in this case.