Never Test Alone – TASSQ presentation in TO

Andre King & I presented “Never Test Alone” at TASSQ in Toronto yesterday evening. After the presentation Joe Larizza (TASSQ President) addressed the group saying that with the economy businesses are looking for ways to reduce costs. Outsourcing testing will be one of them. People need to be proactive in finding ways to reduce cost and produce quicker. Joe encouraged people to talk to their management teams, present the concept outlines in “Never Test Alone” and volunteer to give it a try. See how it works, what it saves and in the end you may be saving more then you expect.

In Never Test Alone testers are involved in the Requirements & Design reviews and validations. This allows the test team to prepare for testing early, creating test cases, test scenario's and other documentation at the start of the project. Plus testers add value to the process from their experience and perspective. This reduces the cost of the test group weeding through requirements later to get an understanding that may not even be a correct one of the system. Enhancements that testers log during testing will come out during the requirement review phase. If deemed required can save money by being incorporated before development starts versus later.

Team up testers with developers during the creation of unit tests, the more tested at this stage the less cost in fixing, less bugs later, and we can reduce the duplication of testing being done between the two groups. Testers now know what has been tested therefore will not have to retest later. A testers perspective in what needs tested will differ from a developers so the combination of the two creates very rigorous unit tests.

If you are doing continuous builds (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Build_automation) the unit tests are run against each build becoming regression tests. So we now have during unit testing, the functional testing and automated regression testing happening very early in the project.

Unit tests can be used in load testing. One example is login where UserID and Password are entered. The unit test can be build to retrieve from a listing of many UserID/Password combinations to execute login many times. What is the savings in knowing during development that the system is not going to have problems with 1,000 concurrent logins? Add this test to the build regression tests and you know throughout your project how well it is standing up to load. Why leave load testing to the end, do it early and save time, money and possibly the project.

Andre demonstrated a tool for automated white box testing, Microsoft Research PEX (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/Pex/). Very impressive and it can be run against code by testers saving development time for development. Check out the link above for a white paper on PEX. Maybe Microsoft will make a version of PEX that testing can use which does not require us to have access to the actual source code.

This is a list of some effects from following this presentation:

  • testing a lot earlier
  • saving money on bug management
  • saving money on system changes late in the project
  • reducing timelines
  • building a team relationship
  •  great feeling of accomplishment

And you are not testing alone, it is a group effort and it is the route to success.

 Link to TASSQ

Presentation Slides

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