Have you ever wondered if your tests are adding value to your work? Well I was reading a post by Andy Knight at Automation Panda who talks about the worries of testing and why people may think that it isn’t adding value. Andy begins by talking about how important testing is to software engineering stressing that people make a job out of it so it must be important. He clarifies that testing is important with one word: Bugs. Bug counting though is not the best way to make sure your test are adding value. Andy talks about three main facts that make bug counting not the best way to see if testing is adding value. They are fast feedback, good testing reduces bug count, bug counting drives bad behavior and bugs are usually rare. He goes into detail on all of these and how they effect the value of testing and he has some really good points for all of them. After he establishes why bug counting hurts testing, he goes onto talk about metrics that would be good for testing. He provides three different metrics being: Time to bug discovery, coverage and test failure proportions. He provides reasoning for all those metrics as well.

I don’t know too much about testing, mostly because the class I’m in is going to teach me about testing but this blog post provides a lot of insight on why testing is important and not a waste of time. Testing is a big part of programming as it makes sure that your code doesn’t have too many bugs so it runs as you want it and if it does have bugs, that you find them and able to fix them as soon as possible. I was able to learn that bug counting isn’t the best metric to figure out that your tests are adding value as they have many negative side effects such causing bad behavior or believing that its a waste of time because there are little bugs even though that means its just good code. It is just good to know that there is other metrics that make testing feel more valuable to the software engineering process. After reading about coverage being a metric, it makes a lot of sense why that would be more helpful of a metric than bug counting, covering a wide spread for testing would make it better to find the bugs and makes sure everything is in smoothly. Testing is an important part of software engineering and since it is so important, you want to use the best metrics for it and this blog post provides the best.

Link: https://wordpress.com/read/blogs/122508714/posts/9140

From the blog CS@Worcester – Benderson's Blog by Benderson's Blog and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.