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SelecTViews: A pet peeve – what is up with the silence about the massive cloud data breach??? Also on the show today – Michael Crump and some great applications for Silverlight.
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More Testing Stories
Let’s finish out this week with an acknowledgement of praise to our worthy testers. Every company I have every worked at/for has done their best to reduce their investment in testing with three exceptions. That’s not a very good track record (three out of dozens).
One of those companies went the other extreme with a ratio of two testers for every developer. That was simply a waste of money.
Another company had a ratio of four developers to every tester. That worked pretty nicely, but the testing was pretty much restricted to system testing.
The last company had a ratio of six developers to every tester. Surprisingly, this company did extremely well. The primary reason was because the developers were required to write unit tests for their own code, and the testing team focused on system and acceptance automated testing.
Don’t take this to your boss as proof that you should re-organize your company and change the ratio of testers to developers. There is no perfect ratio. The reality is that no company can afford to test every possible permutation of things that can go wrong. So it is not how your organized, the tools you have, or the time you are allowed that is the most important (all of those things are important).
What is most important is testing the right things. I worked with one developer who focused simply on unit test code coverage. Was there a unit test for every method written? The team had 100% code coverage…but the software didn’t work. Why, because the tests that were written were not the important ones. I would prefer lower code coverage with relevant tests exercising both positive and negative expectations.
In my experience, testers have a unique mindset. They “Love” to break things. These are the guys who will save HTML in fields for your web forms to see if they can get it to render. They love to find holes for SQL Injection. Worse yet, they love to find ways to expose issues in your software that you know nobody would ever do (but they always do).
We really need these folks. So, on this Friday the 8th (notice I didn’t wait until a Friday the 13th) I want to wave a flag for our testers…keep our software running. So here is my sad attempt to wax poetic with an Ode to Testers.
An Ode To Testers
Let’s hear it for testers…oh what a gang.
They attack your software like an orangatang
Banging on keyboards, swinging the mouse
What kind of software can handle this louse
But oh what a blessing it is to see
Your software pass muster, it’s guaranteed
To meet the requirements you have been given
It’s like a free pass to developer heaven
Let’s thank all our testers
Let’s give them our praise
Who’s testing allows us true holidays
For without all their efforts our software will break
At the worst of all moments, like a pit of snakes
Their work keeps us happy
Their work keeps us sane
Their work is invaluable
So let’s give them praise
Drop me a note with your War Stories, poems, or suggestions. You can reach me at Facebook, Twitter, or e-mail me at btaylor@SSWUG.org.
Cheers,
Ben
$$SWYNK$$
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