[Novalug] coding for testing

Jay Hart jhart@kevla.org
Fri Mar 9 16:50:51 EST 2012


Mark,

I'm not a coder, but I attend the agile leadership network meeting monthly. 
let me ask you this:

1. Who writes the test cases.

2. Do you have a standard definition of done, that the coders, testers, and
customer agree with?

3. Lastly, if a bug is uncovered during testing, who fixes it?

Jay

> 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?
>
> --
> Mark Smith
> mark@winksmith.com
> mark@tux.org
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