Test, Test and Test Again

snikkersnak writes "Richard Collins has written a piece about developers and testers; the article is arguing that in closed development these two roles have to be chained together one-on-one in order to reproduce the 'release early and often' effect of open source development."

Comments

ABsolutly

[Ingolfke]

I am in 100^ agrement hear. Far to often developer dont test and check they're code before they release it This resultsi n a poor edn-user experience. Tey wrok two fast always trying to git on to to the next thing.

Test test tst!!$

one-to-one

[brenddie]

one tester for each developer?? bah, I have around 300 users^Wtesters.....

Re:One tester per developer?

[aadvancedGIR]

That's the kind of testing you can actually do fast and close to the development team, but the real problems come from the impact your code could have on parts you barely know they exist in the full system.
Parts testing is just step 0 of the testing process.

Automated unit tests

[tcopeland]

I think the trick here is for the developers to write lots of automated unit tests. This catches the vast majority of obvious bugs, and lets testers become more like "power users" or something. That is to say, rather than the testers writing bugs like "I did xyz and it crashed" they can write bugs like "it'd be great if this screen had a 'quick user lookup' field". The testers then begin to think of ways to improve and streamline the application, the end users get a better experience, and the developers have more fun because they're actually adding features rather than constantly fixing easy bugs.

Andy Glover has a good blog on testing and QA in general. He uses FitNesse and TestNG and various other Java testing tools so he's pretty up on all the latest junx.

Uh, from my experience...

[Blakey Rat]

From my experience, open source software may be released early and often, but it sure isn't tested thoroughly. Sometimes it seems to me that it's not tested at all, when extremely blatant bugs appear in releases. (One of the recent ones I found is a Import dialog in Inkscape that doesn't alphabetize correctly. This isn't 1985, open source developers, alphabetization of a list of files is a solved problem!)

Of course, I also don't think "release early and often" is a good philosophy. If you release early, by definition you're releasing something that isn't yet ready for the public, and when the public uses it they're going to be disappointed and a lot less likely to try your next version.