What does “Testing” *actually* mean to you?

-
“QA testers do not provide assurance; they help provide analysis and feedback.” (•)
Ask yourself the following — 
• Does your team believe this?
• Internalize this?
• Do they all implicitly have tests with each of their commits?
• Do they care about code-coverage?
• Are the tests explicating quality?
Testing, and QA, are not just about checking functionality — they are about embedding quality in your system, in your processes, and in your maintainability. To summarize, you should
  • • Test throughout the process not only at the end : Test early, test often, and start testing as early in the development process as you can
  • • Build maintainability (and quality!) into the code : Looking for places you didn’t meet the specs is a never-ending task. Instead, write for fault-tolerance/reliability, and then find bugs where you weren’t reliable
  • • Understandability of your code-base is vital — test for it : Oh, you may know what it does, but do your colleagues? The new people you hire? What if you get hit by a bus? Validate your assumptions about this!
  • • Your developers are responsible for the code (and the bugs), not the testers : Align responsibility here — if you built it, you own it , and the testers are here to provide analysis and feedback of your code.
The bottom line is that shared ownership by the entire team, through the lifecycle of the development process, results in higher quality.
(•) Theresa Neale here. She has some excellent talks on QA and Testing, check them out!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Erlang, Binaries, and Garbage Collection (Sigh)

-
Image
The nice thing about garbage-collection is that it is makes memory management absolutely transparent to you Of course, the above is true right up to the point when it stops being transparent, at which point it does a phase change from nice to clusterf**k of biblical proportions .  There are entire posts, books, and suicide notes that have been written about this, and I have no great desire to add to them, save with the minor comment that paranoia about garbage-collection is still justified , albeit only in the edge-cases for most people. That said, I'll give you that Erlang GC is in many ways much, much better positioned in this regard than, oh, Java, but it still rears up and bites you in the butt when you least expect it. ( More information about Erlang's GC vis-a-vis Java here , and Jesper's truly excellent description of Erlang's GC here ).  A story from the past should serve to illustrate this. Once upon a time, in a magical land far far away - well, Her...
Read more

Spot The Difference — Deep Learning Edition

-
Image
You’ve played  Spot The Difference  at some point, right? (Of course you did. We  all  did  ). Think about what you actually did when you were trying to Spot The Difference — in fact, just do it again with SpongeBob juggling above. You’re probably doing something like 1. Quick glance to the left. 2. Quick glance to the right 3. “ Spatula on the left. Wonder if there is one on the right? ” 4. “ Yup, there is. Sriracha on the right. Is that on the left? ” 5. “ Nope! It’s a ketchup bottle on the left! And there is nothing on the plate below it! ” etc. To summarize, what you’re basically doing is looking at each image alternately, identifying objects in each image, and trying to find the same object in the other image. As it turns out, what most Deep Learning systems do is something quite different. They basically do something like this 1. Figure out everything in the first image (“ ketchup bottle at 1 o-clock, empty plate at 3 o-clock, spatula at 1...
Read more