[Novalug] coding for testing

Robert Kuropkat robert@kuropkat.com
Fri Mar 9 14:29:05 EST 2012


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<rant>
So they're underlying argument is "QA is another team, screw 'em"?  Nice.

I'm a coder also, and am sick to death of coders who believe the entire 
company exists by the will of their IDE.  It's garbage.  The company is 
a business, not a geek a playground.  If there is a cheaper way to solve 
a problem then that is what a BUSINESS does and a slick interface is not 
the only problem needing solved.

Remind them where their paychecks come from.  Invite them to go create a 
startup if they don't like it.
</rant>

As a slightly gentler approach :-) suggest to them the end user is NOT 
the only customer of the product.  System Administrators are customers, 
Database Administrators are customers, as are Integrators, Sales, 
Pre-Sales and yes, QA.  These are all CUSTOMERS of their code and they 
ALL have requirements.  It's a sign of our industry's immaturity we have 
still not yet grown up enough to realize the guy with the mouse is not 
the only "user" of the software.  I would submit truly well designed 
software would include full life cycle considerations as first class 
requirements right along side "make the background green."

While I am not a Business student, I would be willing to guess most 
successful business processes solve as many problems as they can as 
early in the process as they can.  That's where it is cheaper and yes, 
that does mean the person solving the problem will not actually be the 
beneficiary of the solution.  Tough...

If you are willing to take a longer view, perhaps introducing non-end 
user centric requirements would be an important first step.  Get back to 
the original problem as a byproduct of that.

Robert Kuropkat

P.S.  If any of this works, or if you find another way to get your 
developer's behind the idea, tell me so I can use it on ours :-)



On 3/8/2012 9:22 PM, Mark Smith wrote:
> *This message was transferred with a trial version of CommuniGate(tm) Pro*
> I'm sure they think the code needs to be tested.  I think the problem
> that I'm trying to indicate, poorly, is that they refuse to create any
> additional code which, in their estimation, will only be useful to QA.
>
> Perhaps another way of wording my question is, what percentage of software
> development companies make special changes which may benefit just the
> testing phase?
>
> As an example, a particular test we do takes several days to do and is
> a serious draw on resources.   The hardware we use isn't cheap and the
> time we take is even more expensive.   There are faster ways of running
> these tests, but in their estimation, it doesn't seem like the kind of
> thing that a "regular" customer will ever run into.  Their decision is
> that this work will not be done because it's only the QA department that
> has to incur the expense of running this particular test.
>
> Another more vague example would, uhm, let's say the creation of a
> function call that would probably only ever be called regularly from QA.
> Let's say, further that it is a function that reports the amount of time
> that some particular operation took.
>
> And so on...
>
> So, I do believe that they believe there's a need for testing, but they
> don't want to make any changes to help that process.
>
>
> On Thu, Mar 08, 2012 at 08:46:07PM -0500, John Warren wrote:
>> My very strong opinion on this is, "Avoiding anything, no matter how
>> trivial, to help automated and manual testing is a sure sign of some
>> impending, dark and laborious coder crisis that will make you question why
>> you work where you work."  Yeah, not good in IMHO.
>>
>> On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 8:22 PM, Mark Smith<mark@winksmith.com>  wrote:
>>> I was having a discussion at the office today.  The coders here are
>>> entirely against writing a single lick of code where it's purpose
>>> will be to support the testing of the software.
>>>
>>> That got me to wondering... I wonder how other software developers
>>> feel about writing code to help software testing.  Is my company just
>>> a one-off?  or do the majority of software developers feel the same way?



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