Testing and Software Quality at TranSystems

Thanks to everyone in San Diego and Nashville who attended the brown bag on Testing and Software Quality on 8/14. I know it was a refresher for most of you, but I hope that it will help you think creatively about the testing process on your next project.

Some of the key points we discussed include:

Testing can be boring, how can we avoid it?

While you can't completely eliminate testing, you can reduce the need for the tedious and lengthy formal testing phase at the end of development, by adopting a "zero-defect mindset" and building quality into the development process itself.

Use an iterative "Milestones" approach that includes testing in each milestone -- starting with the basic "skeleton" of the complete model or application, and adding more detail as you go. Design before you code. Share your work with your project team. Share your work with your customers to confirm your project requirements. Try using prototypes.

Test-Driven Development

One intriguing concept from the agile software world is "test-driven development". This involves writing the tests first, before you write a single line of code.

Why is this useful? We went through a spreadsheet example of converting integers to Roman numerals, and showed how not only did we automate the testing process, but how it helped us think through the complete set of use cases while we were writing the code itself.

The next challenge -- how might we incorporate this into our simulation models or software applications?

The Testing Process

We covered the traditional definitions of unit testing, structured testing, and system testing, and how they fit into a project. This included an example of writing a test plan.

Finally, we talked about how a "bug" is not necessarily bad -- when you think of it not as a shameful blight on your otherwise perfect coding, but as a natural issue to be addressed and resolved in the course of a project. They can help you plan your work, and give you a realistic picture of how close you are to being done with your project. TestTrack is our standard application for tracking the lifecycle of these issues.

The complete presentation is available on the San Diego server.