Testing Times!

Haven't blogged the past week, been busy getting a software application tested. Lot of sleepless nights trying to fix broken pieces or things that didn't seem right. We had instances where something that worked the previous day did not work now. Infact most of these hours were spent by developers scanning the code to figure where things went wrong. A wrong strategy to follow especially when you shouldn't keep the testing team waiting. Any waiting team is a wasteful expenditure. We had a team of three waiting while a team of four developers and a project manager tried to locate the cause of the malfunction. Wonder what's happenning to software development. A better startegy would be to check the data first before delving right into the code. But very few software developers consider this necessary or even look at it as the starting point. Their notion is that something must have crept into the code! And once they open the program source there is no stopping them, Hours and sometimes days pass before a solution emerges while the team that arrives for testing keep themselves busy makeing phone calls, going for long tea breaks or gossiping about the hottest scrip on the stock market. The root cause has been the attitude of developers towards testing and sometimes to application development as a whole. The prerequiste for the test cycle are not laid out in the test plan and sometimes there is no test plan! Even if there is a plan its hapazardly laid out. Testing is always relegated to the end of the cycle and not a continuous activity, so bugs are dicovered only at the very end when there is very little that anybody can do. As for the attitude most developers are content being technical (Java, VB) experts and know very little about the solution that is being developed. Things will change once developers stop being coding drones and instead focus on providing solutions.