How Can I Make Testing Software More Stimulating?

An anonymous reader writes "I like writing software. In fact, I revel in it. However, one thing has always kept me back from being able to write the best software I possibly can: testing. I consider testing to be the absolute bane of my existence. It is so boring and un-stimulating that I usually skip it entirely, pass the testing off to someone else, or even worse, if I absolutely have to test, I do a very poor job at it. I know I'm not that lazy, as I can spend hours on end writing software, but there's something about testing that makes my mind constantly want to wander off and think about something else. Does anyone have any tips on how I can make non-automated testing a little bit more stimulating so I can at least begin to form a habit of doing so?"

Comments

Too close to the subject...

[bgibby9]

Personally I feel that the dev should never do the testing of their own code as they are too close to the subject to test every angle.

Sorry this doesn't answer you question :P

Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Add porn

Focus your attention elsewhere

[afaik_ianal]

Does anyone have any tips on how I can make non-automated testing a little bit more stimulating so I can at least begin to form a habit of doing so?

No, I don't. I strongly think you're directing your effort the wrong way, and duplicating work if you're spending too much time on non-automated testing.

Software Engineers are not good at poking holes in their own work, so you should have someone else doing the bulk of that kind of testing anyway. You obviously need to do some cursory testing to avoid wasting someone else's time, but there are much better ways of directing your testing effort.

Focus on developing unit tests both before and during the development effort. Avoid developing your unit tests after writing the code though - your mind will be tainted with your approach, and you'll miss the obvious stuff. Not only do unit tests reveal bugs, the act of writing them will also help you get interfaces right, and help ensure a better overall design for your code.

Re:the developer should participate in system test

[lgw]

Unit tests should excercise the corner cases in your code. If you know what they are, write tests for them.

QA testing should break all design assumptions about how the software should be used. Having the programmer sitting there telling the QA guy what to click on (and I've seen that far too often) invalidates that. The most useful bugs are the ones where the QA guy says "I did what I thought would get the job done, and instead it formatted my hard drive", leaving the dev to sputter "but, but, you're not supposed to do that". Given enough users, every possible "stupid" thing you can do with your software will be done in the field, and you really want to know that you will at least fail safely in all those "but that's not how you're supposed to do it" cases.