Automated Software QA/Testing?

nailbite writes "Designing and developing software has been my calling ever since I first used a computer. The countless hours/days/months spent on imagining to actualizing is, to me, enjoyable and almost a form of art or meditation. However, one of the aspects of development that sometimes "kills" the fun is testing or QA. I don't mind standalone testing of components since usually you create a separate program for this purpose, which is also fun. What is really annoying is testing an enterprise-size system from its UIs down to its data tier. Manually performing a complete test on a project of this size sucks the fun out of development. That's assuming all your developers consider development as fun (most apparently don't). My question is how do you or your company perform testing on large-scale projects? Do you extensively use automated testing tools, and if so, can you recommend any? Or do you still do it the old-fashioned way? (manually operating the UI, going through the data to check every transaction, etc.)"

Comments

i hate to be obvious, but

[wobblie]

duh, open source

best testing there is

Re:TDD

[r.jimenezz]

It's not that fun :)

I read the book. I had to write an Eclipse plugin recently and decided to give TDD a test drive (I had developed a previous, non-plugin project using TDD before).

The thing is, when you are working with something like Eclipse, i.e. huge and vastly undocumented (the book is good, but doesn't cover many important issues), TDD is good because it helps you choose a path. It allows you to divide your work, is an invaluable help in designing and certainly boosts your confidence for refactoring and stuff like that.

However, if you have a clear idea of what to do, TDD becomes rather boring and tedious. What's worse, it's very low-level testing for the most of it and does little to help you in usability and acceptance testing. And like many other posters point out, the best way to get testing done is to have independent people do it.

That said, TDD certainly has a place in the development process, and one thing I do appreciate about it is that proponents seem to push it more sensibly than XP.

This color scheme could use some testing

[scruffy]

There's no way to avoid a lot of manual testing, except at /. where they can implement an awful color scheme with next-to-zero testing, apparently.