Insomnia

Last week, I went to an OSEF event. The topic of the event was about testing automation. It was really cool because it was not about tools or techniques but mainly about problems implementing a testing automation process in your software organization.

The panel was varied and included people from organizations large (IBM, Alcatel, FileMaker) and small (MXI, Solacom). Everyone had interesting inputs about automated testing. But everyone seemed to agree that they were an essential part of their quality strategy.

In most cases, automated tests ran the full gamut from top down UI testing all the way to function-by-function unit testing. One of the guys on the panel actually described that their company try to implement Test Driven Development.

Since most of my customers don't agree that this is a good way to spend their money; I have never had the opportunity to try TDD. Like this guy, I am not sure that all tests written this way are useful from a quality perspective. But like this guy, I feel that unit tests are an excellent way to convey low-level design ideas. Even when we don't automate unit tests, unit test cases are part of our patch submission process. We have found that they are a great way to describe in a few words, the general idea of the patch and some of the edge cases to test.

That being said, my personal experience taught me that unit tests could save my behind. It is a good feeling to run a test suite after some bug fixing to discover that the bugfix actually introduced a new problem that causes some of the unit tests to fail.

Labels: tech

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