Testers want to deliver a perfect system. In fact, all development team members do. Developers often add "just one more feature" in an attempt to make the application better. Testers want to test every possibility, no matter how unlikely it is to happen in real life. We know that any application can fail; there is always at least one more defect. We want the application we are testing to be perfect. We don't usually consider whether or not this application really needs to be perfect. Nor do we consider whether we are the best people to decide if it should be released.

Some software is life critical and must be tested completely - medical software and military software, for example. Some business software is business critical; the business will not survive if it does not perform correctly. Some software can be less than perfect and simply be inconvenient - software used infrequently by a few experts, for example.

This presentation will look at these situations in terms of what is really required and how testers, and anyone with a quality focus, can handle them in order to maintain enough credibility that management will listen to us when the situation is truly critical.