Daily Archives: 29/11/2011

Software quality: When defect tracking is not necessary

“I don’t care about your bug reports. Only the software matters,” said author and Google’s engineering director James Whittaker at the controversial STARWEST keynote. Whittaker’s presentation challenged a number of beliefs that we’ve held strongly to in traditional software testing, including the idea that users won’t accept poor quality. “Users know software sucks. They don’t care about quality. They don’t want perfect software. They want us to fix the bugs,” said Whittaker, claiming that users are better than testers at testing. This point of view is completely contrary to what Caper Jones and Olivier Bonsignour, say in their book, The Economics of Software Quality. In Quality metrics: Defect tracking throughout the software lifecycle, we looked at why some experts feel that tracking defects is mandatory for high-quality code, and in turn, customer satisfaction. In this follow-up piece, we will look at the other side of the story, the argument against tracking defects.

1. Only the software matters

2. Many defects never get fixed

3. Defect tracking is a poor way to communicate

4. Defect metrics can be misleading

Source: http://searchsoftwarequality.techtarget.com/tip/Software-quality-When-defect-tracking-is-not-necessary

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The Trials of Application Testing

未命名 Nobody likes to test applications, but we all know that if it’s not done properly some testing-related issue is eventually going to come back to haunt not just the developer, but the entire business.

Most organizations are still discovering application defects pretty late in the application development lifecycle, according to a new survey of 140 development professionals working in companies will 1,000 employees or more that had 50 or more developers on staff that was conducted by Osterman Research on behalf of Electric Cloud, a provider of software production management tools. Worse yet, many organizations are encountering the same bugs over and over again, which means application development costs are being driven up unnecessarily.

Despite these issues, most development organizations take an inconsistent approach to application testing. Some testing activities are automated, while others are done by hand. And surprisingly, many development organizations report they have trouble convincing senior managers about the value of automated testing tools.

As much as anyone values their job, nobody enjoys tediously looking for the same bugs over and over again when there is a tool that can do the same thing in a matter of minutes. That doesn’t mean that manually testing applications is going to go away any time soon. But it does mean that IT organizations as a whole could be a lot more efficient about application testing.

Source:http://www.ctoedge.com/content/trials-application-testing

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Testing Your Test Code

In the world of software testing and quality assurance, we all know the value test automation brings by improving test coverage, overall product quality and the tester’s productivity. But all of this value flows in and the return on investment occurs only when the automation code is robust and reliable enough to produce consistent results to catch product bugs. The term “product bugs” is very important here. If the automation code does not catch bugs (if this is truly because the product has reached a steady state and is largely bug free, then it is acceptable) or shows more false negatives (due to test code issues rather than product issues), there will be a lot of wasted effort including:

Test Automation Effort – code design, implementation and maintenance resulting in wasted time, cost and human resources

Triage time – involving the product team to look into the invalid bugs reported resulting in expended time, cost and human resources and more importantly the reputation of the test team

Resource Usage – machine, other infrastructure and software usage for automation execution

Source: http://www.ctoedge.com/content/testing-your-test-code

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