Quality Street – or how the fancy becomes mundane
Stephanie van Dijck
Altran
Testing has shed its craftsmanship. Or so it appears if we believe the agile movement of the last years.
In reality, testing is still a profession that is underrated by a lot of projects and businesses. The cry for better testing is heard but not really dealt with, resulting in faults found late and the scramble to solve (or hide) them.
Fixing faults is easy when we find them immediately after making them. Inserting testing then in several stages of development enables early fault finding.
But, testing hurts and is not perceived as ‘cool’ by many developers.
What does interest developers is writing actual software and making progress that can be shown off at a demo.
What is progress if the quality of the work done is unclear?
How to prevent apparent progress of features that have been implemented but contain faults?
The pain can be taken away by testing more: testing at more stages, in smaller portions.
This appears contradictory but is crucial to keep quality under control as early as possible. Whether we are dealing with a new development where we can insert testing from the start, or whether we come upon a legacy system with decades of untested code: laying out a quality street will give us more control.
This talk is about inserting quality checks at many stages, covering the credo of “If it hurts, do it more often”.
The Quality Street (or “buildstraat” in Dutch) has been applied in all our in-house and a few key customer development projects. The goal is to show you how to combine testing with development in such a way that you seem not to be testing at all. Moreover, introducing the technical approach to testing seems to make it a lot less painful.
