Software testing trends don't appear out of nowhere. They start small and they grow.
I recently had the privilege to host Lee Thomas, open group master-certified IT specialist with IBM Rational Brand Services and a leader in the automated functional testing community.
He has almost 30 years of experience. Lee's presentation was literally eight slides with eight themes. There was no bullet-pointed breakdowns or lists in the presentation. Simply the eight areas where testing will change.
Here's what he had to say:
1. “More testing brings larger staff - When I started in the testing industry over a decade ago, we would be given, say, two weeks to test a new product, regardless of the complexity of the product or the length of the code. On top of that, there were only a few of us testers, and if the developers had run late then, as always in testing, the two weeks scheduled for us to test the product would be cut because the deadline was never movable. So team sizes have steadily grown over the years to deal with that and the trend continues today.
2. “Speed of testing will accelerate - In the old days the testers would sit around waiting for a product to be developed and then work furiously for two weeks to test everything before stamping it yea or nay and sending it on its way. Today the opinion of testers is not a formality just prior to shipping to ensure that bums are covered. Developers and project leads want real feedback as soon as possible so they can ship as bug free code as they can get.
3. “Test automation will increase - More testing, by more people, for the duration of development projects has led to a requirement for more test automation. Expect yet more tools to emerge as a result.
4. “Tool standardisation - With the growing emergence of tools to automate and speed up the testing process, and more testers using them, rapidly becoming familiar with the tool environment is going to be a problem. The answer to this is that tool developers must begin to standardise interfaces.
5. “Domain expertise and collaboration - With the growing requirement for more testing, more often, one previous solution was to outsource testing to the Indian sub-continent. The trap that people fell into was that they thought anyone could test software. What they quickly discovered was that domain expertise is absolutely critical. One of the major issues that testers will grapple with in the near future is how to rapidly transfer knowledge from experienced testers to Indian college graduates. It's an intellectual challenge and it will undoubtedly be aided by innovative tools. Another related issue is specialisation. When I started in testing, we had a number of products to test and we were expected to be experts in them all. Today we find a wealth of sub-specialties in testing. But where will everyone find the specialists they need? It's most likely that they will pay a premium and turn to consultants to gain short term, on the job, knowledge transfer to beef up their permanent staffs.
6. “Developers learn testing - With the need to know about the working status of a developed component as soon as possible driving increasingly earlier testing, developers are now under pressure to perform regression testing as they code. But experienced developers who have been in the industry for some time are not accustomed to that. One of the things they're going to need to acclimatise themselves to is test-driven development methodologies, where testing begins even before the coding has started. Typically, they'll write a unit test before they code. If they cannot write the test then they'll immediately determine that they don't understand the requirement. There will be testers who will teach developers what and how to test. Testers who are familiar with xUnit frameworks.
7. “Co-operation - All of these people testing and starting testing so early in the project will necessitate communication and co-operation. In the old days developers would drop a requirements document on the tester's desk so he or she could build test cases. But when the tester found a problem he couldn't go back to the developer. He had to go to a manager who would go to the developer because testers are a lower form of life. Testers learned to mark up the document and send it back and the document would go back and forth until everyone was happy. It doesn't make sense to slow down the process with intermediaries. Why have people in the same building if they cannot directly communicate? Collaboration is commonplace today, but it takes many forms from personal verbal to all manner of electronic and digital. There is a lot of knowledge in the various forms, and capturing it in context will become a challenge. Another obvious outcome of larger staffs is that there are going to be far more test results, more data coming out of the testing, and that needs to be stored and archived. Testers are going to have to figure out how to store the data and develop some governance around that.
8. “Digestible results - Managers today, who may or may not be testing experts, want test results as early as possible in a manner that divulges the implications quickly and clearly to facilitate rapid correction. As a result, tools will be more tightly integrated and there will be more training. Companies will also amass more data to ensure they gain a competitive edge, so BI will begin creeping into software testing to generate longer term views to improve the testing process.”
Thomas was right when he said that people have high expectations today of simplicity of use: everything must be as simple to use as an iPod, even complicated applications in the aerospace industry, so there is huge pressure to get increasingly complex products working correctly, and that necessitates more testing, which places enormous demands on testers. It may make our lives as testers a little more difficult, but expecting the trends that Thomas highlighted at the recent IndigoCube seminar, hosted at IBM's offices in Sandton, gives one the opportunity to properly prepare.
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