How can lessons from Luigi’s Mansion apply to software testing and automation?

Luigi’s Mansion is a popular Nintendo video game series. It’s basically Ghostbusters in the Super Mario universe: Luigi must use a special vacuum cleaner to rid haunted mansions of the ghosts within. Along the way, Luigi also solves puzzles, collects money, and even rescues a few friends. I played the original Luigi’s Mansion game for the Nintendo GameCube when I was a teenager, and I recently beat the sequel, Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon, for the Nintendo 3DS. They were both quite fun! And there are some lessons we can apply from Luigi’s Mansion to software testing and automation.

#1: Exploratory Testing is Good

The mansions are huge – Luigi must explore every nook and cranny (often in the dark) to spook ghosts out of their hiding places. There are also secrets and treasure hiding in plain sight everywhere. Players can easily miss ghosts and gold alike if they don’t take their time to explore the mansions thoroughly. The same is true with testing: engineers can easily miss bugs if they overlook details. Exploratory testing lets engineers freely explore the product under test to uncover quality issues that wouldn’t turn up through rote test procedures.

#2: Expect the Unexpected

Ghosts can pop out from anywhere to scare Luigi. They also can create quite a mess of the mansion – blocking rooms, stealing items, and even locking people into paintings! Software testing is full of unexpected problems, too. Bugs happen. Environments go down. Network connections break. Even test automation code can have bugs. Engineers must be prepared for any emergency regardless of origin. Software development and testing is about solving problems, not about blame-games.

#3: Don’t Give Up!

Getting stuck somewhere in the mansion can be frustrating. Some puzzles are small, while others may span multiple rooms. Sometimes, a player may need to backtrack through every room and vacuum every square inch to uncover a new hint. Determination nevertheless pays off when puzzles get solved. Software engineers must likewise never give up. Failures can be incredibly complex to identify, reproduce, and resolve. Test automation can become its own nightmare, too. However, there is always a solution for those tenacious (or even hardheaded) enough to find it.

Want to see what software testing lessons can be learned from other games? Check out Gotta Catch ’em All! for Pokémon!