From the Editor of Methods & Tools » software testing

Software Testing & Quality in Methods & Tools Summer 2010

The Editor — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 06:59:13 +0000

Methods & Tools is a free e-magazine for software developers, testers and project managers. Summer 2010 issue has just been published with the following articles:
* Aspects of Kanban – Lean Worfklow Management
* Test Language – Introduction to Keyword Driven Testing
* A High Volume Software Product Line
* Better Requirements Definition Management is Better for Business
* The Core Protocols, an Experience Report – Tools for High Performance Teams
* Tool: eValid- Functional and Load Web Testing
* Tool: Hudson- Continuous Integration Server
* Tool: FitNesse – Test Cases Management
* Tool: VoodooMock – Mock Objects Framework for C++
* Conference: Jazoon

80 pages of software development knowledge that you can download from http://www.methodsandtools.com/mt/download.php?summer10

Linkopedia May 2010

The Editor — Wed, 12 May 2010 11:06:28 +0000

Blog: How to make Scrum fail

Blog: New Programming Jargon

Blog: The 9 Capabilities of Communicators

Article: Test Driven Development using Flash Builder 4 and FlexUnit

Article: Common Product Owner Traps

Article: The Busy Developer’s Guide to SQL Server Modeling

Tool: Instant Django is a portable Django development environment for Windows

Tool: theSCRUM is a free solution for teams using Scrum

Tool: Tattletale gets you an overview of your project or a product.

Video: Continuous Integration and the “Cup of Coffee” Test

Video: Using FireBug to Debug JavaScript

Video: Selenium + FitNesse – A QA Multiplier Effect

Find more interesting links on the software development links directory, the software development tools directory, the software development articles directory, the software development blogs aggregator or the software development videos directory.

Ten Articles to Learn More on Test-Driven Development (TDD)

The Editor — Mon, 03 May 2010 11:56:58 +0000

The software development articles directory has just passed the mark of 2000 articles categorized in its database. Test-Driven Development (TDD) is currently a topic of debate in the software development community, as even the value of unit testing is questioned. Here is my selection of 10 interesting TDD articles that should help you get more knowledge on this topic. I have tried to find items that could apply more specifically to different programming languages.

* Improving Application Quality Using Test-Driven Development (TDD)

* Introduction to Test Driven Design (TDD)

* TDD from scratch

* Demystifying Extreme Programming: Test-Driven Programming

* TDD – FDD – BDD… Why not PDD?

* Using JMock in Test Driven Development

* Mocking the Embedded World: Test-Driven Development, Continuous Integration, and Design Patterns

* Test-Driven Development in Python

* Apply Test-Driven Development to your Database Projects

* Unit testing and Test Driven Development (TDD) for Flex and ActionScript 3.0

Agile + Software Testing & Quality in Methods & Tools Spring 2010

The Editor — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 09:19:19 +0000

Methods & Tools is a free e-magazine for software developers, testers and project managers. Spring 2010 issue has just been published with the following articles:
* Using WatiN to Leverage Common Elements in Web Testing – structure your Web testing efforts
* Five Symptoms of Mechanical Agile- detect agile adoption issues
* Writing Testable Code – testable code is better code
* Model-Based Testing Adds Value – a quicker way to functional testing plans
* Tool: Sonar – monitor code and project quality
* Tool: Express Agile Project Management – a simple tool for Scrum
* Tool: Apache JMeter – for load and functional testing

60 pages of software development knowledge that you can download from http://www.methodsandtools.com/mt/download.php?spring10

Can Developers and Testers Love Each Other?

The Editor — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 09:38:40 +0000

After the results of a previous poll focused on functional testing automation, I wondered if there was still a great divide between the worlds of development and functional testing. So I did this follow-up question to check who was performing the functional testing.

This poll was trying to determine who perform functional testing in your IT department? Here are the answers:

Software developers	15.4%
Specialized testers:	37.4%
Both	36.2%
Nobody: functional testing is done by end-users	11.0%

Participants: 409
Ending date: March 2010
Source: Methods & Tools

As you can see, in close to 50% of the cases, developers are not involved in functional testing. Trying to find the causes of this situation, I asked for explanations in various testing and agile groups on LinkedIn. Two explanations came out:

Developers do not master functional testing tools. These are specialized tools that use mostly proprietary scripting languages, even if some new tools like the WatX family use the same programming language to create tests. Then validation needs to be independent from development. Following this rule, people said that the role of analyst and functional tester can be mixed in software development projects, but you cannot ask a developer to test its own work. This opinion has been expressed both in software testing and in agile focused groups.

This situation is also representative of the mistrust relationships that often exists between development and testing teams in software development organizations and apparently Agile hasn’t’ changed it. If few people will deny the fact that the customer is the ultimate judge to validate an application, QA people often describes developers as careless people that are unable to challenge their own work and developers see QA people as disconnected from the project reality and slowing the delivery of applications to users. Having worked in large software organizations, I have sadly witnessed the truth of both cases: developers that don’t test enough their work and QA people that don’t know the domain of the application or built process that could be nice looking in theory, but practically not adding value to the software delivery.

I strongly favor the case when developers take the full responsibility from understanding the requirements to deliver the application to the user. The more specialization you involved in the process, the more information you loose when you try to transmit it. Understanding the requirements allow the developer to take the full responsibility of its code. If it cannot be trusted for functional testing, then it should be the same for unit testing…. and then it should just not be trusted as a developer. I understand that this vision could sound a little bit utopian due to the reality of human behavior, but to me it is not more idealistic than thinking that users can give you the right requirements and have enough time and knowledge to validate the delivered application.

Resources

Functional Testing Tools Directory

SQA Zone

Testing TV

Debug It!

The Editor — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 11:40:40 +0000

This book provides a structured approach that will help programmers to identify and remove bugs in code. It is based on a four steps process: Reproduce, Diagnose, Fix, Reflect. For each activity, the author provides practical material on how perform it. The second part gives a higher vision of the debugging process and deal with topics like communicating with users or prioritizing bugs treatment. Finally, the book discusses special situations and the relationship between bugs and other areas of software development (source control, build, etc.).

The book is easy to read and the material is presented in a very structured way with different “viewpoints” that help to understand the content. Besides the main text where important concepts are put in evidence, real life cases shows how things happen in the real world. There are also some “Joe asks…” sections where the author answer pertinent questions on the current topic.

With my many years of experience in supporting and debugging large existing enterprise systems, I have to say that Paul Butcher summarize and structure all the knowledge (and more) that I have, sometimes painfully, accumulated during this activity. This is therefore an excellent book that I will recommend to everybody that is involved in software development in general and maintenance activities specifically.

Reference: “Debug It!”, Paul Butcher, Pragmatic Bookshelf, 214 pages, ISBN 978-1934356289

Get more details on this book or buy it on amazon.com
Get more details on this book or buy it on amazon.co.uk

Linkopedia December 2009

The Editor — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 13:03:04 +0000

Post: Command and Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS)

Post: Programmers humor

Post: Reduce Manual Test Debt

Article: A Checklist of Questions to Consider Before Starting a Large-Scale Agile Adoption

Article: A performance benchmark method for comparing open source Java application servers

Nitrogen is an Erlang Web framework

Speed Test is a multi user test case management application

UISpec is a Behavior Driven Development framework for the iPhone

Video: Building an Automated QA Infrastructure using Open-Source Python Tools

Video: Behaviour-Driven Development

Video: Event Handling with Linq

Linkopedia September 2009

The Editor — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 07:42:17 +0000

Excel Spreadsheet: Value Decision Table for Measuring Business Value

The Only Truly Failed Project

Software Developers Should Never Have Dress Codes

Introduction to DDD for the implementation oriented

Tech Support Cheat Sheet

The Grinder a load testing framework

Tackle an open-source scrum tracking tool

Article: Kanban vs Scrum

Article: Grails and Continuous Integration: An Essential Combo

Article: Deployment is the Goal

Video: What they Don’t Teach You About Software at School: Be Smart!

Video: Agile Testing

Video: Storytelling Techniques

Why Tester Won’t Like Agile

The Editor — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 08:54:10 +0000

Following my thinking about the fact that functional testing was the dividing barrier between specialized developer and tester roles, I found in the book “Agile Testing” by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory an excellent list of fears that QA teams could express against agile adoption:

“Testers cling to the concept of an independent QA team for many reasons, but the main reason is fear, specifically:

* Fear that they will lose their QA identity

* Fear that if they report to a development manager, they will loose support and programmers will get priority

* Fear that they lack the skills to work in an agile team and will lose their jobs

* Fear that when they’re dispersed into development teams they won’t get the support they need

* Fear that they, and their managers, will get lost in the new organizations

We often hear of QA managers asking questions such as “My company is implementing agile development. How does my role fit in?”. This is directly related to the “loss of identity” fears.”

Source: “Agile Testing”, Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory, Addison-Wesley, 2009

No Functional Testing for the Dumb Developer ?

The Editor — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 11:42:29 +0000

A recent Methods & Tools survey tried to evaluate the usage of tools to automate execution of functional software tests. A similar poll was conducted in 2005 and it was interesting to compare the results.

	2009	2005
My organisation has no tool for functional software tests	37%	38%;
My organisation has tools, but my project or I do not use them	19%	26%
I use tools for functional tests	44%	36%

Participants: 268 (147)

Ending date: August 2009 (August 2005)

There is an improvement of tool usage since 2005, but the results seem still to show an ambiguous situation to me: 63 % of companies have functional software tools, but 56% of participants don’t use any tool for functional testing. In my personal experience as a developer in (non-agile) business software development organizations, the developers had to be able to understand functional requirements and to test them before their delivery to the user for acceptance testing.

Asking questions about this situation to members of the software development community, I discovered many causes for the non-usage of functional testing tools by developers. The first problem is the awareness problem of the testing activity. Testing is still often considered as something that you do before the deadline of a project…. if you have some time left. Functional testing is even more at the end of the testing sequence from the developer side. Automation of this activity is also costly. Besides the price of the commercial tools that can be very expensive, you have also to set-up a production-like environment (software, data) to perform meaningful tests. But this doesn’t completely get to the point, as all answering organizations were performing functional tests.

Every functional test tools has its own language, so you cannot transfer easily the knowledge you have with one tool to another. It is difficult to maintain automated scripts of functional testing tools. If the application to test evolves too quickly, scripts become obsolete and are not used anymore. It is also mentions that tools are bought sometimes for specific project and may not be useful for other that are based on different software technologies.

However, a majority of the remarks about the difference between tools adoption and tools usage pointed out that the functional testing phase marks in many organizations the division between the developer and tester responsibilities. Despite the fact that agile approaches aim at reducing work specialization with the developer discussing directly with the user, it seems that there is still an important number of organizations where QA specialists perform functional testing. This could be seen also a consequence of the specialization of the functional testing tools, but I don’t think they are more difficult to learn than unit testing tools.

This specialization, or non-responsibility, hides the global aim of the projects to the developer. From my point of view, this situation is similar to creating tires not knowing if they will be used for a car or a truck, and not being able to test drive the vehicle that will use them to check if they are working efficiently. Some will tell that software developers are not interested to talk to users, but we have to realize that we do not produce software for ourselves. It make me think of the operations guys that seemed sometimes to want computers with only operating systems running on them. They blame all the problems on the internal developers that supply software for the company users. Good developers should be able to understand what their users want, functionally test what they want to deliver and even better with some tools.

Linkopedia August 2009

The Editor — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 05:36:22 +0000

The Lego Software Process

My Thoughts on NoSQL

Easier mocking with Mockito

Unit Testing Has Changed How I Write Software

Every Tuesday at 1 PM EST Robert Dempsey answers your questions about Agile, live.

Sonar enables you to collect, analyze and report metrics on source code

Agavi is a powerful, scalable PHP5 application framework

Selenium Inspector

Article: Practical Architecture in Impractical Times

Article: Patterns + GWT + Ajax = Usability!

Video: Good Test, Better Code – From Unit Testing to Behavior-Driven Development

Video: Empowering the Agile Team

Video: ASP.NET 4.0 Roadmap

Summer 2009 issue of Methods & Tools

The Editor — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 08:40:29 +0000

Methods & Tools is a free e-newsletter for software developers, testers and project managers. Summer 2009 issue’s content:

* Responsibility Driven Design with Mock Objects
* Agile Coding and Testing
* How to Quantify Quality: Finding Scales of Measure
* Scrum Product Owner Guide
* TDD, FDD and BDD Compared
* Open-Source Messaging Servers

60 pages of software development knowledge that you can download from
http://www.methodsandtools.com/mt/download.php?summer09

Upcoming Software Development Conferences

The Editor — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 08:10:38 +0000

Methods & Tools is proud to be the media partner of many good software development conferences. Here is a list of the upcoming conferences that we support:

* Better Software Conference & Expo, June 8-12 2009, Las Vegas, USA

* Code Generation 2009, June 16-18 2009, Cambridge, UK

* Integrating Agile Conference, June 18 2009, Hoofddorp, The Netherlands

* International SPICE Days, June 22-24 2009, Stuttgart, Germany

* Jazoon’09, June 22-25 2009, Zurich, Switzerland

* Eclipse Time 2009, June 23-24 2009, Toulouse, France

* ProjectWorld & World Congress for Business Analysts, June 24-26 2009, Baltimore, USA

* Conference of the Association for Software Testing (CAST 2009), July 13-16 2009, Colorado Springs, USA

* Agile 2009, August 24-28 2009, Chicago, USA

* Software & Systems Quality Conference, September 14, Zurich, Switzerland

Find an expanded list of software development conferences on SoftDevConferences.com

Implementing Automated Testing

The Editor — Mon, 25 May 2009 07:52:06 +0000

This book presents a comprehensive treatement of the domain of software testing automation. The first part defines and describes test automation, proposing a business case for automation and discussing the pitfalls that should be avoided. The second part is a roadmap for test automation. It gives six keys for software testing automation payoff:
1. Know your requriments
2. Develop a strategy
3. Test your tools
4. Track progress and adjust
5. Implement the process
6. Put the right people in the process.
Four appendixes complete the book. They provide a process checklist, explain how automation applies to various testing types, disscuss tools evaluation and give a case study.

The fact that the autors have worked with the Defence industry might have affected the way the book was conceived and written: with structure and rigor. The discussions, recommandations, references and tools suggestions apply however to every software testing situation and not only to organization that are strongly process oriented. The aim of the book is to be a guide that can help to implement successfully automated software testing and it certainly achieve its objective.

Reference: “Implementing Automated Testing”, Elfriede Dustin, Thom Garrett & Bernie Gauf, Addison Wesley.

Get more details on this book or buy it on amazon.com
Get more details on this book or buy it on amazon.co.uk

Agile Testing

The Editor — Mon, 04 May 2009 09:04:01 +0000

Some authors are good at presenting theories but unable to connect them to practice. Other are good at telling stories from the trenches, but without being able to produce an analysis of the situation and propose some solutions. On the less examined domain of agile testing, Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory are, luckily for us, presenting a book that covers both the personal experience of being a tester in agile projects and a conceptual vision of the place of quality assurance in software projects. Thus you will find in this book “stories” that comes from past projects and “mind maps” that helps to have a high-level vision of the material of each chapter.

The book offers resource to organize the quality assurance and testing activities in an agile project. It explains also the relationship between test automation and agility. It provides also a part dedicated to the chronicle of the agile testing activities during project life, showing how every member of the team could contribute to quality.

I think however that the more interesting contribution of the book is Testing Quadrants. This concept classifies testing activities depending on their focus (technology or business) and their intent (supporting the team or validating the product). Adding an agile perspective to the original work of Brian Marick, the authors provide resources and examples for each quadrant to make sure that you will cover all the aspects of testing for your project.

This book is certainly a very valuable resource for every people involved in software testing, even if this is not in an agile project. It will also be valuable for ScrumMasters and project managers that have to think on how to integrate the testing activities in their projects.

Disclaimer: Lisa Crispin has been a (valuable) contributor to Methods & Tools since 2003

Click here to get more details on this book or buy it on amazon.com

Click here to get more details on this book or buy it on amazon.co.uk

What is an Agile Tester?

The Editor — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 19:58:45 +0000

Here is a good definition of the Agile Tester, from the book “Agile Testing” of Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory: “We define an agile tester this way: a professional tester who embraces change, collaborates well with both technical and business people, and understands the concept of using tests to document requirements and drive development. Agile testers tend to have good technical skills, know how to collaborate with others to automate tests, and are also experienced exploratory testers. They’re willing to learn what customers do so that they can better understand the customers’ software requirements.”

Source: “Agile Testing”, Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory, Addison-Wesley, 2009

Linkopedia February 2009

The Editor — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 07:26:20 +0000

DevCreek is a community dedicated to improving software quality through the collection, analysis and sharing of project metrics.

DomainDrivenDesign.org is a open forum to share ideas and interact with other people interested in domain-driven design.

Apache Cayenne is an open source persistence framework providing object-relational mapping (ORM) and remoting services

Speed up your Web pages. Learn how you can make the browsing experience better for dial-up users by reducing loading times by as much as 80 percent, in some cases.

JavaScript Test Driven Development with JsUnit and JSMock. This article is a crash course in writing maintainable JavaScript.

The Role of Leadership in Software Development. In this video, Mary Poppendieck discusses of leadership roles in software development — what works, what doesn’t and why.

Practicing Testability in the Real World. This video presents a testability checklist that will ensure that core testability principles are considered while testing a particular feature.

Learning JavaFX. Robert Eckstein teaches you the fundamentals of the new JavaFX programming language, all in fifteen minutes or less!

Find more interesting links on the software development links directory, the software development tools directory, the software development articles directory or the software development videos directory

Linkopedia January 2009

The Editor — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 09:22:12 +0000

XUnitPatterns.com test patterns presents material about refactoring test code.

FlexMonkey is a testing framework for Flex apps that provides for the capture, replay and verification of Flex UI functionality.

Automation for the people: Deployment-automation patterns, Part 1. This article identifies a collection of key patterns for developing a reliable, repeatable, and consistent deployment process capable of generating one-click deployments for Java applications.

Yin Yang & Project Management. How understanding the balance inherent in agile guiding principles can help project managers make the transition from traditional project management methodologies to agile.

Patterns in Practice: Design For Testability. This article examines the design issues, patterns, and principles that can enhance testability.

Diving into PHP: Video Series. This is a brand new series on the ThemeForest blog that will show you EXACTLY how to get started with PHP

JUnit Performance Testing – Instrumentation and Assertion

The Value of Small Tests. This video demonstrates the value of small, isolated tests and explain good engineering practices for how to structure them.

Find more interesting links on the software development links directory, the software development articles directory or the software development videos directory

New Conferences Partnerships

The Editor — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 08:53:56 +0000

Methods & Tools is proud to have been chosen as media partner by the following software development conferences

REConf 2009, March 9-12, Munich, Germany

Practical Software Quality and Testing Conference West, April 27 – May 1 2009, Las Vegas, USA

Software & Systems Quality Conference Germany, May 26-29, Dusseldorf, Germany

More software conferences information and archives on http://www.softdevconferences.com/