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How Healthcare.gov Changed the Software Testing Conversation
An anonymous reader notes an article about how the tribulations of Healthcare.gov brought the idea of software testing into the public consciousness in a more detailed way than ever before. Quoting:
"Suddenly, Americans are sitting at their kitchen tables – in suburbs, in cities, on farms – and talking about quality issues with a website. The average American was given nightly tutorials on load testing and performance bottlenecks when the site first launched, then crumbled moments later. We talked about whether the requirements were well-defined and the project schedule reasonably laid out. We talked about who owns the decision to launch and whether they were keeping appropriate track of milestones and iterations. ... When the media went from talking about the issues in the website to the process used to build the website was when things really got interesting. This is when software testers stepped out of the cube farm behind the coffee station and into the public limelight. Who were these people – and were they incompetent or mistreated? Did the project leaders not allocate enough time for testing? Did they allocate time for testing but not time to react to the testing outcome? Did the testers run inadequate tests? Were there not enough testers? Did they not speak up about the issues? If they did, were they not forceful enough?"
Having been brought on late to QA a few death marches/trainwrecks in my time I have found that many projects don't get QA involved until way too late in the game.
.com boom days when everything was developer-centric and testing was seen as an unneeded cost that could be covered by the coders themselves -I don't need to tell anyone here why that is a bad idea.
This was very common in the
Ideally QA gets to help validate that the functional requirements are adequately addressed in the design. In many cases, lacking a spec of any kind I would have to create one of my own based on what the product was able to do or close to being able to do at that time in order to make a test plan.
When you are brought on board a sinking ship there is no point in blaming the crew for the state of the ship -all you can do is damage control to validate whatever is working and then lower the bar as to what constitutes 'working' or 'functional' -particularly if some major components or functionality are missing.
You're going to be seen by management as the people who are going to point out what idiots and incompetents the developers were and be seen as the enemy by the developers who were probably led down the rabbit hole by changing or nebulous requirements and unrealistic schedules...
So it is important to try to walk the middle line -making observations about the current situation without casting blame or making guesses about how the project got to that state (although it may be obvious when you look at the principals and the agenda). Gap analysis of both testing and in the product functionality and features is another thing that needs to be done more often in order to present a realistic picture of the current state of the product or project.
As a consultant it is nice to be able to come into these things knowing that you didn't help cause the trainwreck -you are just there doing triage and trying to save the patient....and sometimes management will listen to you about project and requirements that they ignored when brought up by their own people. Even if it is 20/20 hindsight perhaps they will heed the techies the next time they embark upon this path -Nah!
-I'm just sayin'