Manual Testing Blog

It seems our recent white paper about the CIO research has really sparked a debate.

Chris Spagnuolo, a very well regarded blogger, wrote a piece about it on his site and more than 40 people have commented and debated on the topic. There were some really interesting points raised - one of which being that the reason there is CIO apathy towards quality is because many are working to short-term goals.

“They will get hammered if they go over budget or miss a delivery date, but poor quality can usually be patched and covered up long enough for them to be promoted and reassigned away from the problem.” says one.

“The time frame for many software initiatives is 3-6 months. Poorly conceived and constructed “solutions” are often celebrated as wildly successful. Few of us are still around once the failures of poor conception and execution are felt.”

“In my opinion, top leadership is interested only in the “appearance” of quality, or the reputation of quality. That is something they can sell. Unfortunately some leadership is cashing in on the history of quality and not ensuring it will remain. It takes time to tarnish a reputation and they know this and sort of borrow against that time by focusing resources on feature delivery. This ends up usually delivering shoddy features that mostly work, and then saddling the development and test organizations with technical debt and a backlog of bugs. Meanwhile top management can continue to sell product based on past reputation. It’s usually not a sustainable way to operate for more than a short-term gain.”

In her article out today, Bola Rotbi, Analyst at MWD, has picked up on this ‘technical debt’ theme. “You have a piece of functionality that you need to add to your system. You see two ways to do it, one is quick to do but is messy - you are sure that it will make further changes harder in the future. The other results in a cleaner design, but will take longer to put in place.” - she likens it to credit card debt. If you pay of the whole amount every month, you don’t incur any interest charges etc. She then goes on to say…

“This is more than a hunch: there is evidence to suggest that technical debt is building. For example, Original Software recently released the results of a survey that showed that “40% of CIOs admit corporate indifference to their own software quality”. This suggests that effective management of any technical debt is unlikely to be a concern to a sizeable percentage of organisations. The stark truth is that most businesses are simply too lax and lack incentives to monitor and, more importantly, manage their technical indebtedness. There is already ample evidence to demonstrate that all manner of cost savings and productivity benefits can be achieved if organizations just did things right with the support of appropriate tools. But we still see significant IT failures and IT teams still end up fire fighting for any number of reasons, with some even attaching a certain amount of macho cachet to their ability to fighting fires rather than preventing them in the first place. Clearly, conditions are ripe for building up an unhealthy technical debt.”

It is a really good article with nice synergies to the current economical crisis. I do recommend you read it. Alternatively, join the debate

Maria & Ben:”Hmmm, this brown square thing - what is it again? Some kind of musical instrument? It makes a funny sound when you shake it!” Darren: “I don’t care, just gimme gimme gimme - my camp handbag needs filling up!” *smash* *tinkle*

Congratulations to Michael Cuthbertson from Applied Card Technologies who was the winner of our TestExpo North caption competition on facebook for the above caption dialogue - There is something particularly effeminate about the way his colleague Darren is holding that bag!

I brush three times a day. See my shiny white teeth.eeee

Congratulations to Abhinav Agarwal from Adobe India who won our SQC Conference caption competition on facebook with his caption about our lovely colleague Maria’s cheesy smile.

We’ve just come back from a couple of great UK industry events – TestExpo up in Manchester and the SQS Conference in London.

The response to our “Anarchy in the QA” campaign was overwhelming with hundreds of t-shirts given out at the shows and many spot prizes won. Congratulations if you were a lucky winner! The graffiti on our stand also went down a storm and thanks to all those who took part and scrawled something on it – (I won’t be thanking you later when I’m trying to clean it all off!)

As a follow up we would also suggest you download your very own “Anarchy Pack” which includes our new Anarchy in the QA whitepaper as well as some other interesting items. You can download your “Anarchy Pack” at www.origsoft.com/revolution.htm

If you want to know more about our software quality solutions, we are holding some webinars over the coming weeks. These webinars will cover in more detail our Total Testing approach to software quality, please book your place using the links below.

Live Webinars:
Tuesday 7th October 3pm

Wednesday 15th October 11am

We took lots of photographs at both shows, there may well be some of you!
Become a member of the Original Software Group  on Facebook and add your captions to our photos to be in wth the chance of winning a brand new Samsung digital camera!
You’ll find the event albums here –
SQC
TestExpo

In a recent article, Eddie Correia suggests Ten Concepts for Successful Automation Scripts

It’s a nicely written article, as one would expect from a highly regarded editor, however I do think he is missing the point. Why do we need to manually build scripts in the first place - technology is already in place to do this for us using a point and click interface. He says (and I quote) “A basic understanding of programming concepts is helpful…” BUT WHY? Why should test automation be the sole ownership of programmers. Surely this is where the industry is failing? Surely by being so secular and almost acting like a “boys club” where only certain people can become members, these people are ensuring that test automation will never work.

Test automation needs to be used by many different people, developers, QA, Business Analysts, and end users. How can an end user ensure their scripts are correct? The short answer is never. Test automation needs to be widely accessible to all of these people, by doing this everyone can benefit from quicker testing, the bottleneck will reduce and application time to market will improve, not to mention the quality of the application.

This whole scripting lark is precisely the reason why manual testing is still so prevalent. So why does the industry continue to flog a dead horse? Must be something to do with that boys club.
So, instead of 10 tips on creating successful scripts, I have one tip. Bin the scripts, and use code free technology with the ability to update itself automatically when an application changes. You will find this technology alive and kicking in TestDrive-Gold from Original Software. Several hundred companies already swear by it. Maybe you could benefit too?

Another week and another story involving the UK Government and an embarrassing loss of confidential data. This time a memory stick containing personal details on 84,000 criminals have gone AWOL. Of course the government have been quick to blame someone else, but the fact remains, if they had taken simple measures such as scrambling the data then there would be no issue.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7575989.stm

Data scrambling as part of an overall strategy to ensure data integrity is important. Not just for the UK government, but for anyone carrying out software testing, especially when the aforementioned testing is carried out over live data; (and this happens with frighteningly regularity - you would have thought people would learn!)

TestBench (available for iSeries and Oracle) from Original Software has sophisticated Test Data Management modules which allow you to extract and scramble test data, reset it to pre-set checkpointsand more, thus ensuring compelte data integrity, regardless of what happens to it or who gets their dirty little hands on your data.

Maybe we should send a couple of copies to Home Secretary Jacqui Smith - sounds like she could do with some help!

http://www.origsoft.com/Solutions/TDM.htm

http://www.origsoft.com/Products/Testbench.htm

By Maria Martin, Marketing Communications Specialist
Thank you to all those who filled out our survey on TestDrive-Assist from Original Software, we appreciate you taking the time to do this!

A survey was emailed on 6th August 2008 to anyone who activated the TestDrive-Assist trial and provided a legitimate email address. We wanted to know what your thoughts were about our trial and look for ways to improve our product and service. The results were positive and we look forward to finding new ways to better our solution.

We entered everyone who left their email address at the end of the survey into our prize draw to win an Apple 2GB iPod Shuffle.

You could still be in with the chance to win our fantastic NINTENDO Wii, since we have re-launched our Pit Stop Challenge Game on the Manual Testing website, www.manualtesting.com/play.htm. Just like last time, the player with the fastest time by October 31st 2008 will win the Nintendo Wii!

Good Luck to those Pit Stop Challenge players!

I’ve just finished reading a blog post by an industry analyst which I feel compelled to write about and recommend people go and read – http://www.mwdadvisors.com/blog/2008/08/dilemma-of-good-enough-in-software.html

Bola Rotibi is a high-profile and highly experienced analyst focused on software development technologies, processes and market trends. She recently moved from Ovum to Machetier Ward-Dutton, one of the growing number of well respected, ‘open source’ styled analyst groups.

In her post she discusses the concept of ‘good enough’ software and argues that ‘too often the desire to deliver something quickly - especially to meet a deadline, however ambitious or unrealistic - overrides the key question of (fully determining) whether what is being delivered is actually “good enough”.

“The attitude of ‘good enough’ has been hijacked as an excuse for “sloppy” attitudes and processes and a “lets suck it and see” mentality. Surely such an attitude cannot continue to exist in delivering software that is increasingly underpinning business critical applications?”

Now, no one would come right out and say ‘actually I don’t think our software is good enough to be fit for purpose’ – if it’s your baby, you’ve got to love it, even if it sometimes pukes on your new suit -, but I wonder how many development teams can actually say (without their fingers crossed behind their back!) that they are confident that the application has been rigorously tested and is robust enough to go out the door.

All too often, when talking to our clients, there is a theme that is constant – “before we bought your solution, we were just testing what we could in the timeframe allotted to us – exploratory testing the bits that we thought might have been affected by change.” - i.e. prodding at it to check it is alive, as opposed to trying to find out why it is ill. Now this is not the fault of those QA teams. It’s simply that the business was not putting enough importance on the testing phase, not giving them adequate time or resources to run thorough tests – all they could do was to check it was alive and working! 

This seems to be all too common. In her blog, Bola continues:

“What I find incredible after all this time - given the weight of evidence and eminent studies on the cost savings and the growing complexity and importance of software in our modern lives - is that the “sloppy” mentality and attitude still holds such sway in software delivery processes.Many organisations don’t spend nearly enough effort on improving the quality of the software they produce. More often than not they pay lip service to the concept whilst secretly holding the belief that it is a waste of resources (time, staff and money).”What are your thoughts on this? – anyone on the coalface that can give their take on this and share experiences, please speak up…

By Maria Martin, Marketing Communications Specialist
I would like to offer CONGRATULATIONS to our winner of the Pit Stop Challenge game on www.manualtesting.com.
The fastest time, or should I say, the fastest legitimate time since we know that there were a couple of testers who tried to break our game went to Troy Davis from Trizetto Group, USA with 27.09 seconds on the clock! A fantastic Nintendo Wii is on it’s way to Troy, well done! If you would like to have another go at playing to win on our site, keep us bookmarked, since a new game will be coming soon…

By Stuart Bishop, Head of Development

 On the 21^st September 2008 I am running in my first half marathon. I have never run more than 6 miles before, so it is going to be a challenge! At the same time, I would like to raise some money for Adoption UK who provide and support a national self-help network for adoptive parents, prospective adopters and everyone involved in adoption. Please do not feel obliged, but do take a look at the link below, sponsoring really couldn’t be any easier. Many thanks Stuart Bishop http://www.justgiving.com/stubishop