Michael Bolton is one of the well respected and experienced software testing guru around. And he has posted this series of Testing vs Checking articles on his blog. In one of the introductory posts he has mentioned:

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Checking Is Confirmation

Checking is something that we do with the motivation of confirming existing beliefs. Checking is a process of confirmation, verification, and validation.

Testing Is Exploration and Learning

Testing is something that we do with the motivation of finding new information. Testing is a process of exploration, discovery, investigation, and learning. When we configure, operate, and observe a product with the intention of evaluating it, or with the intention of recognizing a problem that we hadn’t anticipated, we’re testing

Checks Are Machine-Decidable; Tests Require Sapience

A check provides a binary result—true or false, yes or no. Checking is all about asking and answering the question “Does this assertion pass or fail?” Such simple assertions tend to be machine-decidable and are, in and of themselves, value-neutral.

A test has an open-ended result. Testing is about asking and answering the question “Is there a problem here?” That kind of decision requires the application of many human observations combined with many value judgements.

Testing Is Not Quality Assurance, But Checking Might Be

You can assure the quality of something over which you have control; that is, you can provide some level of assurance to some degree that it fulfills some requirement, and you can accept responsiblity if it does not fulfill that requirement. If you don’t have authority to change something, you can’t assure its quality, although you can evaluate it and report on what you’ve found. (See pages 6 and 7 of this paper, in which Cem Kaner explains the distinction between testing and quality assurance and cites Johanna Rothman’s excellent set of questions that help to make the distinction.) Testing is not quality assurance, but acts in service to it; we supply information to programmers and managers who have the authority to make decisions about the project.

Checking, when done by a programmer, is mostly a quality assurance practice. When an programmer writes code, he checks his work. He might do this by running it directly and observing the results, or observing the behaviour of the code under the debugger, but often he writes a set of routines that exercise the code and perform some assertions on it. We call these unit “tests”, but they’re really checks, since the idea is to confirm existing knowledge. In this context, finding new information would be considered a surprise, and typically an unpleasant one. A failing check prompts the programmer to change the code to make it work the way he expects. That’s the quality assurance angle: a programmer helps to assure the quality of his work by checking it.

Testing, the search for new information, is not a quality assurance practice per se. Instead, testing informs quality assurance. Testing, to paraphrase Jerry Weinberg, is gathering information with the intention of informing a decision, or as James Bach says, “questioning a product in order to evaluate it.” Evaluation of a product doesn’t assure its quality, but it can inform decisions that will have an impact on quality. Testing might involve a good deal of checking; I’ll discuss that at more length below.

Checkers Require Specifications; Testers Do Not

A tester, as Jerry Weinberg said, is “someone who knows that things can be different”. As testers, it’s our job to discover information; often that information is in terms of inconsistencies between what people think and what’s true in reality. (Cem Kaner’s definition of testing covers this nicely: “testing is an empirical, technical investigation of a product, done on behalf of stakeholders, with the intention of revealing quality-related information of the kind that they seek.”)

As a result there are some really ctitical comments made by readers in there.

Personally I liked the initial idea but I need to ponder a bit more on it to come up with my opinion about it.

I haven’t been able to read all of it as yet, but if you are interested than here are the links to complete Testing vs. Checking Series
Testing vs. Checking
Transpection and the Three Elements of Checking
Pass vs. Fail vs. Is There a Problem Here?
Elements of Testing and Checking
Testing, Checking, and Changing the Language
Tests vs. Checks: The Motive for Distinguishing

Enjoy!!