Totally Test Infected
Submitted by Phil Kirkham on Sat, 02/12/2006 - 12:00.
general software testing
11 months on from my first blog entry and the time of year that is traditionally used to look back and (test) reflect, where am I now ?
Sitting with the test team, that's where - thats what I call getting test infected.
Though it took my boss all year to convince the board to allow a developer to switch roles to being a tester. So that means one of my goals for next year is glaringly obvious - educate the board into the value of testing and get them to realise that the programmers should be doing testing anyway.
I've learnt to use NUnit and have been testing the web services API's of one of our apps, found a few problems which led to the developer writing better unit tests so that aspect is working really well.
I've learnt Watir and Ruby, this could prove very useful to give some nice eye-candy demonstrations to the board as well as being great tools for a tester to have.
I attended a SIGIST where I met the host of this site and I'll be at the next one.
And I've become the tester that all the programmers want to be the one testing their project
Main lessons learned ?
Testing is what I want to do - I've found my home.
Testing isn't just about testing code and finding bugs - it's showing developers how they can test their own work so that they can work on new projects and get away from the code-test-fix-code-test-fix endless cycle, it's about making the results of testing visible so that managment can see the effort required to test a program.
And while programming skills are useful so are communication skills.
Thanks to all the people writing blogs and articles out there, they are a real help and inspiration
Sitting with the test team, that's where - thats what I call getting test infected.
Though it took my boss all year to convince the board to allow a developer to switch roles to being a tester. So that means one of my goals for next year is glaringly obvious - educate the board into the value of testing and get them to realise that the programmers should be doing testing anyway.
I've learnt to use NUnit and have been testing the web services API's of one of our apps, found a few problems which led to the developer writing better unit tests so that aspect is working really well.
I've learnt Watir and Ruby, this could prove very useful to give some nice eye-candy demonstrations to the board as well as being great tools for a tester to have.
I attended a SIGIST where I met the host of this site and I'll be at the next one.
And I've become the tester that all the programmers want to be the one testing their project
Main lessons learned ?
Testing is what I want to do - I've found my home.
Testing isn't just about testing code and finding bugs - it's showing developers how they can test their own work so that they can work on new projects and get away from the code-test-fix-code-test-fix endless cycle, it's about making the results of testing visible so that managment can see the effort required to test a program.
And while programming skills are useful so are communication skills.
Thanks to all the people writing blogs and articles out there, they are a real help and inspiration