Taking to Testing
February 15, 2007 —
(Page 1 of 2)
The message these days from software purveyors and industry analysts alike is that testing needs to be done just as soon as coding begins. They say it costs too much to wait until an application is completed before fixing things that are wrong.
Vendors and pundits like to chart how costs increase exponentially as a software project moves further along the life cycle, from determining requirements, through design, coding, testing and maintenance. They say traditional software methods often squeeze the time for testing at the end of a project, almost ensuring that defects will make it into the final release.
You don’t hear people arguing against these points. What you might hear, however, is pushback from developers, who say extensive test-case writing is not what they signed up for. There is cultural resistance from those developers, the analysts and software vendors admit, to have testing invade their territory.
I recently moderated a Web seminar in which continuous integration testing was the topic. And in much the same way a parent would cajole a teenager to perform certain household chores, one of the presenters—Ian Hayes, founder of Clarity Consulting—laid it out for developers and managers: “What’s in it for you?”
The traditional end-of-cycle approach usually works like this: Code is written, code goes to the QA department, QA finds as many bugs as they can and throws code back to the developers. In this scenario, the error might occur in a bit of code the developer has not seen or worked on in quite a long time.
Continuous integration testing works like this: Code is written, test case is written, defects are found and corrected. The test cases are reused throughout the life cycle, ensuring better test coverage of the code.
So, developers want to know, “What’s in it for me?” First, defects are caught while the code still is fresh in the developer’s mind.
The problem is fixed before anything else is built upon it, so the fix won’t break anything else. Second, better code is passed through to QA, so there are fewer returns to the developer, who now has more time to do what he or she loves—that is, creating new code.
Share this link: http://sdt.bz/30120
Most Read Latest News Blog Resources
Zeichick’s Take: Radio moves from analog waveforms to digital packets
Streaming radio highlights the need for streaming applications to be designed to take up as little bandwidth as possible
|
|
Taking enterprise architecture to the business side
Startup Corso is bringing out a cloud-based planning platform that ties into business plans
|
|
Appcelerator Acquires Cocoafish to Add Instant Mobile Cloud Capabilities to its Industry Leading Titanium Platform
Appcelerator Offers Messaging, Social, Location and Storage Mobile Cloud Services to All Mobile App Publishers
|
|
ComponentOne Releases a Collection of 40+ UI Widgets Powered by HTML5 and jQuery
ComponentOne has announced the 2012 release of Wijmo: a kit of UI widgets for HTML5 and jQuery development
|
Taking enterprise architecture to the business side
Startup Corso is bringing out a cloud-based planning platform that ties into business plans
|
|
Top five apps to manage your workload
Web applications offer new ways to track your “to-do” lists
|
|
Not so fast when it comes to testing in the cloud
Developers face outsourcing, virtual lab management and mobile devices as obstacles
|
|
Xceed releases UX-focused suite for Microsoft’s WPF
"Blendables" helps match user experiences to developer visions
|
Are you at risk for burnout?
Burnout is a severe problem and it can strike at any time. Here's how to tell if you are nearing the edge.
|
|
Agility, mom, and apple pie
If we're to evaluate the state-of-the-art in software development, we should start with the values espoused in the Agile Manifesto.
|
|
RIM woos developers with free tablet
How do you get more apps ported to the BlackBerry PlayBook? By giving every developer a free tablet, of course!
|
|
GitHire: Use Headhunters to Find Your Perfect Programmer
Are you a hiring manager tired of scouring the job boards? Check out this new service that will find 5 people interested in your jobs.
|
The Hidden Costs of Software Licensing
Moving beyond paper-based software licensing to more flexible, software-based licensing is a business decision. There is a growing trend tow...
|
|
Case Study: You May Need a Development Mechanic
As a contractor for a major financial player in Germany, SOBEGE, a German-based consultancy specializing in embedded IT and web services, wa...
|
|
Ensuring Software Quality at a Major International Bank
One of the world’s leading international banks has adopted AgitarOne technology for delivering generated unit tests for their Java software...
|
|
Load Testing Adobe Flex Applications
Adobe Flex applications may be different from applications you’ve worked with before. For classic HTML web applications, the server does all...
|