There’s a popular trope in the software development world these days that suggests that everybody on the team is responsible for testing. With that idea in mind, some people take an extreme position: since everyone tests, no one needs dedicated testers any more. Developers can do all the testing; or business analysts can do all the testing; or the customers can do all the testing. Then there’s another notion (which, … Read more
The previous post in this series provided a detailed description of testing framed in terms of Intention, Discipline, Testability, and Realization: It might be tempting to unroll these frames by starting in the top right, and rearranging them in a nice, tidy, linear sequence: Although it’s not the way people usually talk about it, you could think of this as a kind of end-to-end testing. Most of the time, so … Read more
In the last post, I introduced four frames for testing, each of which might present a set of ideas for covering a product with testing at various points through its development. On the way to a complete package, system, or service, people produce many different ideas and artifacts, each of which can be tested. Moreover, people with different interests, temperaments, and roles in the development process perceive testing in different … Read more
Last time, we looked at what the business wants from development. What does the business want from that part of development we call testing? Sometimes people say that what the business wants from testing is confidence — reassurance that everything is okay. This is understandable — confidence is a good feeling for designers, developers, managers, and the rest of the business. Confidence and reassurance are not the business’s goal, though; … Read more
In the previous installment, we looked at what the business wants: a product of high value, and one for which costs of development and will be low. This time we’ll look from a slightly different angle: how does the business get what it wants? There is a kind of universal development cycle. No matter what your development model might be, it probably looks something like this: Since it’s a cycle, … Read more
In the first installment of this series, I introduced two key things that the business wants from development: a product of high value and low cost. In order for the business to get a high-value product, we must envision success so we can set about building it. And yet… there’s risk. It’s easy to assume that we’ve built a high-value product, and that cost to the business is low and … Read more
Conversations about testing in all kinds of places have been going pear-shaped for a long time. As Jerry Weinberg was fond of pointing out, the word “testing” is overloaded, lumping a variety of ideas and activities together. The word “testing” gets applied to different actitivities, performed by different people, working in different contexts, performing different tasks with different priorities, at different moments in the development process. No wonder that people … Read more