8.10Key Takeaways

• Verification: "Building the product right" — does it match the spec?
• Validation: "Building the right product" — does it meet user needs?
• A product can pass verification and fail validation
• QA engineers must participate in both — checking specs AND advocating for users
• Modern QA shifts validation left: question requirements early, do not wait until UAT

Interview Talking Point: "I treat manual testing as a thinking discipline, not a task to automate away. I use session-based exploratory testing with charters and time boxes to systematically find issues that scripted tests miss. When I file a bug, I include a minimal reproduction, environment details, and a clear severity/priority split — because a bug report that a developer can reproduce in under two minutes gets fixed in hours, not weeks. I also distinguish between verification and validation — I test against specs, but I also ask whether the spec itself serves the user."