As a tester you may be asked this question… How long will the feature take to test? Recently I was asked this and I responded with something like this…. I can test it in 5 minutes, 5 hours, 5 days, 5 weeks or 5 years. Now I hate giving estimates. People tend to take estimates as gospel and hold you to them if you then have to say that the testing may take a little longer. As testers we can test a feature for 5 minutes but we could also test it for 5 years. Trying to get the balance right between having enough time to test the feature and satisfying someone who needs it to be delivered as quickly as possible can be difficult. However I think that we should not be asked how long something takes to test, I think as testers we should be asking a question instead. Going back to answering the question “How Long will the feature take to test?”, lets take an example feature and describe what we could test for each of the estimates I gave above. Lets say the feature is