Monthly Archives: March 2013

Getting Started with Developer Testing

Carl Meyer, a web developer, recently gave a talk at PyCon 2013, Getting Started with Automated Testing. This is a great primer for developer testing. He uses Python in the interactive examples, but the lessons apply to any language.

Why Automate Tests?

  • Make sure your code is working as intended. 
  • Tests are a great documentation tool to explain the intended behavior for the next person maintaining your code. 
  • Manual testing takes time, and if you have to run the tests over and over again (due to changes in your code), you will appreciate the investment you took to automate.  He gave a great example of a friend who had to debug the 14th page of a survey.  Each code tweak meant filling in 13 forms just to get to that 14th page. 
  • Bug reporting is a lot easier if you can point to an automated test that invokes the bug.
  • Great quote: “Writing tests on weekdays is better than debugging code on weekends”

Tips for developers

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Welcome Software Test Professionals

Readers of Software Test Professionals, welcome to my humble blog.  I had the pleasure to answer several questions from the testing community in the Ask The Tester column, written by Mike Lyles.

One of the questions came from Anna Royzman, where she asked about a blog post and paper that I wrote called Customer-Driven Quality. For more information, you can read the original blog post or read the paper that I wrote for the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference.  The slides from the presentation are available as well, but they don’t read very well without the talk track.

Feel free to leave a comment or ask any additional questions.

A Primer for Software Leaders

Keith Klain, leader of test organizations in the financial industry, has been blogging about his leadership methodology. His posts lay out an excellent set of guidelines to follow when thinking about leadership of a team of technical professionals.

Starts with Values

The foundation of an organization is its values. These values influence who we choose to join the team, how we operate, and how we interact with our stakeholders. Keith’s values are well described in his first post about leadership.

Next comes Principles

Principles are the “rules” that help us make day-to-day decisions which are consistent with our values. Having a set of principles helps the leader describe why he/she made a particular decision.

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