I don’t mean to wage in on Toyota disastrous situation. I just think that this is an essential software testing lesson and it illustrates some key issues that testers like us have experienced over the years.
My cousin was flying out of Atlanta this morning, and expected to be in San Francisco this afternoon, in time for a family get-together dinner. Unfortunately, she, along with many other travelers around the country were stuck at the airports this morning and will have to adjust their plans due to delays caused by a computer bug. I just got back from the 8th International Conference on Software QA and Testing for Embedded Systems, Oct 21 – 23. This was my first time at this conference and I’d give it a high grade for the overall quality of the content and speakers, and in particular, for the people who organize this conference. They are first class. Thanks to my new friends at SQS S.A., Spain — Sander Hanenberg, Jesús M. de la Maza and Begoña Laibara — for treating me well during the conference. My keynote “Automation Coverage Less than 50%? Don’t Do It!” explored the common excuses for failing to achieve high-volume test automation output. It also pin-pointed underlying barriers to test automation… I recently came back from the Software Testing & Evaluation Summit in Washington, DC hosted by the National Defense Industrial Association. The objective of the workshop is to help recommend policy and guidance changes to the Defense enterprise, focusing on improving practice and productivity of software testing and evaluation (T&E) approaches in Defense acquisition. So, what do I have to do with the Defense enterprise? One of the features of the workshop is to invite software testing experts from both commercial industry and academia to share state-of-the-practice strategies, processes and software testing methods. I was honored when the Director of Defense Research and Engineering asked me to do a keynote as the commercial industry-recognized subject matter expert on software testing, test automation and evaluation. What I am about to share however, is not what I said at the conference. It’s about my takeaways from the summit. Although not surprised, I was intrigued by the fact that while we have made progress, there is still much work to do to overcome the four software testing challenges we have been fighting over the last three decades: Test automation provides great benefits to the software testing process and improves the quality of the results. It improves reliability while minimizing variability in the results, speeds up the process, increases test coverage, and ultimately can provide greater confidence in the quality of the software being tested. However, automation is not a silver bullet. It also brings some problems. The solution for test automation is to first define the test methodology, then choose the right enabling technology to help you implement the methodology. The chosen methodology should provide measurable improvements to the following four success drivers: * Visibility |
||
|
Copyright © 2012 Software Testing: Line By Line - All Rights Reserved |
||
Subscribe in a reader
Follow us on Twitter
Find us on Facebook
Read our Whitepapers
Get monthly Newsletter
Add to Technorati
Recent Comments