Skip to main content

Spending Testing Time Effectively

For this weeks blog for the topic Quality Assurance and Testing, I read an article titled “5 Reasons you are wasting your testing time.” That is not to say that testing is a waste of time, but rather as the first sentence says, “Not all our testing time is spent effectively.”

The blog goes on to list the five reasons that a programmer might be using their testing time ineffectively, which are as follows: (1) “You don’t set a clear goal for your testing task;” (2) “You don’t understand the value of the feature for your End User;” (3) “You do not keep track of what you tested, your findings and the other ideas you got while testing;” (4) “You do not consult existing information to get insights into your test;” And (5) “You do not do post-test reviews and feedback sessions with your peers.”

These are all straightforward ideas, but I’m sure most programmers testing their code have fallen into several of these, if not all. This list provides a framework to avoid these pitfalls. In class, we have been going over ways to be more methodical when testing. This list is a little more elementary than what we have covered, but it is good information to use nonetheless.

A key takeaway is to treat testing more like a science than throwing it together willy-nilly. There has to be a method to the madness. You have to know what you want the test to do. You should have a clear understanding what the end product should look like and how it should look to the end user.

The final section in the article said testing isn’t “Rocket Science, but it is not a trivial task either.” It should not be seen as something that could be done by almost everyone, which is a common belief in the industry. This is not true. It is an important job that should be done right. It requires being very organized and staying on top of things. There are many things that can be done haphazardly. Testing is not one of them.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Sprint 5 Retrospective (Capstone)

It is a shame that we are so close to the end of the semester. We were gaining so much momentum. It took us a while for us to get off the ground, but once we did, we never stopped gaining speed. I feel we will be able to keep this up through this last sprint. My hopes at the beginning of the semester for what we could accomplish were unrealistically high, but I am not disappointed with what we accomplished. We have not completed a full working component quite yet, but we are very close. I think our efforts are best spent finishing the one we are currently working on and doing it right. If we divided our efforts into starting something new, we run the risk of not fully completing anything. In the sage words of Ron Swanson, “Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.” If we are able to get the tabs working beautifully, I will be happy with our effort. I have felt that our group has done a phenomenal job this sprint and every sprint before with our communication. We have a few ...

Testing: Like Destroying Sandcastles

https://joecolantonio.com/testtalks/223-testing-dream-journaling-smashing-sand-castles-with-noemi-ferrera/ In this blog for software quality assurance and testing, I decided to return to the “Test Talks” podcast, presented by Joe Colantonio, for another episode (#223). In it, he sat down with Noemi Ferrera, a software tester for a Chinese mobile gaming company to get her take on the subject. Noemi gave a few interesting metaphors that I appreciated for how to look at testing. In one, she gave the example of going to a movie where you had already read the book. It was different than how you imagined it while reading it, and testing is a way of making the “movie version” fit the way you envisioned it playing out.  The other metaphor for testing that she gave was, if you were children at the beach, the developers would be the ones building the sandcastles, whereas the testers would be the ones destroying them. I don’t know if that would be the most accurate way of lookin...

Data Structures Primer

I've been a tutor for this past semester to students taking Introduction to Programming. Many who have come to my session are moving on to Data Structures next semester. They asked if they could have a primer as to what to expect. I have some resources that I have found helpful both while taking the course and tutoring it in the past. It will take me a little bit to compile a good list of those, but for now, here is a bare-bones list of topics of topics you might expect to see for a data structures course: Part 1: - Running time of code segments (Big-O Notation) - Abstract Data Type (ADT) - Interfaces (when to use "implements", cannot instantiate them, what inheritance is) - Superclass, subclass, method overriding/overloading - Abstract classes Part 2: - Binary Search Trees - Stacks (and its four methods — push, pop, peek, empty) - Linked list (single, double, circular) - Prefix and postfix notation (compare to infix) Part 3: - Min/Max Heap - Hash Table...