Practical Software Testing Resources?

rhartness asks: "I've been a software engineer by profession for a few years and a programming enthusiast for much longer. As my experience has increased, so has the size of the projects that I have had to work on. My software testing method involves trying to do everything I can think of that the end user might try to do. Hopefully, this will break the application if there is a bug within my code. The current project that I am working on involves numerous tiers within a smart client environment. Trial and error testing is no longer sufficient — there is simply too much that could happen. Searching the Internet for software testing resources provides an abundant amount of information but it's often quite philosophical and verbose. What are some practical resources that Slashdot readers use for testing your software projects?"

Comments

automatic unit testing

[coyote-san]

A huge step is to put in unit testing / regression testing that's run nightly, and idealy with every build. You should at least cover the basics, e.g., at the persistence level can you create/read/update/delete a record? If you load a parent object, do dependent objects get loaded as well? At the presentation layer you can verify that a missing field will set the right error message.

You still need to do additional testing, but this will catch the underlying errors that can cause flakiness -- and worse, bad workaround -- at the higher levels in your code.