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Industry Watch: Testing culture undergoes dramatic shift


By David Rubinstein


 David Rubinstein
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April 17, 2012 —  (Page 1 of 2)
There’s a renewed interest in test teams and tools, and Microsoft’s Chuck Sterling can think of two good reasons why this is so.

First, he said, development teams have changed around agile processes and continuous delivery of software, but test teams are still using processes that no longer integrate with how developers work.

Second, with the emergence of the cloud and the predominance of Web applications, the pace of development is now a 10x factor over the 18-month or 2-year cycles the industry used to see for software releases. So, testers need tools to work at this speed and to integrate with how development teams are working.

The term “agile testing” was defined in 1986, Sterling noted, but is only now gaining momentum. “There’s a dramatic change” under way in the testing culture, he said. “Test teams were looking at the availability of a box, and now they’re looking at the reliability of a service...and whether or not you had the right idea. Testers are looking at things now with a customer-colored view. ‘Is that what the customer wants?’ That’s a huge change.”

Yet the more things change, the more they stay the same. For instance, 80% of software testing done today still is performed manually, according to Voke analyst and founder Theresa Lanowitz. “Testers still struggle with the cost/quality/schedule triangle. They still spend a lot of time documenting test cases, and provisioning test environments, and reproducing defects, for instance. They need to optimize their time to do more strategic types of things.”

Both Lanowitz and Sterling agree that testing needs to drive quality upstream. “You can’t test in quality at the end,” Sterling said. “By then, if you find the software architecture is poorly defined, or there are major coding problems, it’s almost too late to do anything about it. You want to drive testing back into the ideation. It’s no longer at the end.”

One way to better integrate dev teams and test teams is to get them onto a single point of reference or a common language. “Having a common language is a big benefit,” Lanowitz said. “That enables a high degree of collaboration.” It’s to an organization’s advantage, she said, to have the automated test engineer on the test side, for example, using the same language that the codebase was developed in. With that, you get the added bonus of transparency, she pointed out.



Related Search Term(s): agile, Microsoft, testing, virtualization

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