Too Darned Big to Test?

gManZboy writes "In part 2 of its special report on Quality Assurance (part 1) Queue magazine is running an article from Keith Stobie, a test architect in Microsoft's XML Web Services group, about the challenges one faces in trying to test against large codebases."

Comments

I get it

[Hyksos]

So this will be Microsoft's latest excuse, then? ;)

Re:I get it

[pklong]

Naa, we all know Microsofts testing strategy is to release it to the public and see what happens.

You save on the software testers wages that way :)

Re:I get it

[dioscaido]

Google is pretty awesome at that too. Do then have any products that aren't in beta?? :)

lots of monkeys

[FlashBuster3000]

they should just hire a lot of monkeys to test their software.
Besides, in this way the IQ of the later user and the testers arent differing too much.

Re: lots of monkeys

[bcmm]

The monkeys are busy writing it. It's like infinite monkeys trying to write shakespeare, except when they finally write code that compiles it has many many unused lines, contibuting to bloat.

Retooled jokes

[Ford Prefect]

"Yo' codebase's so fat, when it get in a lift it has to go down!"

"Yo' codebase is so bloated, it's got its own dialling code!"

"Yo' codebase's so big, NASA includes it in orbital calculations!"

Etc. etc., ad nauseam et infinitum...

Software rewrites may be considered harmful, but at which point do you declare that enough is enough and start again, breaking it down into smaller, easily tested modules? Big, old projects (like, say, OpenOffice.org) can get so appallingly baroque that there must be vital areas of code which haven't been modified (or, more importantly, understood) in years - how do you test those?

Re:Retooled jokes

[DrMrLordX]

If it ain't baroque, don't fix it.

Ha ha! Ha ha ha!

*cough*

Re:Got an idea

[oirtemed]

Yes. It's a wonder why we even have packages like bugzilla anyhow. Nobody tests and reports bugs in opensource software. Ever. Nobody fixes them, either. Ever.

Brought to you by the letter 'c'

[Anonymous Coward]

Mark, incentive is spelt with a c.

I was tempted to send you a text on your phone to tell you - are you sure you want to leave that on your website to be harvested? You might regret it in a few years.

M$ are much more clever than that (-1 Flamebait)

[patrixx]

They call their monkies "End users" and charge them big bucks for the testing, and on top of that have them accept EULA's that take away their rights. ;-)

Re:Got an idea

[Skye16]

Oh, come on, you know the moderators here are on crazy. They're the same people who post here, and you've read their comments. Slashdot is some sort of Mecca for insanity. It makes me tingle down there.

(That's me being silly, in case your funny bone is still broken =O )

Re:Shouldn't that be too bloated to test?

[Daniel]

Even if I had fifty pears reviewing my code bugs are going to slip in because they don't fully understand what I am writing.

Well, that's because pears can't code worth a darn. You should be using oranges. I know some people will hold out for bananas, but I've never had good luck with them; they're too fickle. Oranges will get the job done every time.

Daniel