AB Testing – Episode 1 by Brent Jenson and Allen Page.
In this weeks testing episode, I went back to episode 1 just so I can address topics that Allen and Brent found necessary to start their testing podcast episodes with. Both Allen and Brent are high-end software developers and testers who worked for many big companies and performed many big tasks in the world of software developing and testing. Allen page was a software-testing manager who contributed to many books in the world of software testing. (His books are really good if you wanted any information of software testing). Brent Jenson also worked for Microsoft for over 20 years and accumulated many experience holding the position of software testing Director. They continued to talk about a presentation method used at Microsoft which I thought would benefit the software testing industry should we all decide to utilize it. They called it the Lean coffee lives. As comical as this sounds, lean coffee is a structured, but agenda-less meeting. Participants gather, build an agenda, and begin talking. Conversations are directed and productive because the agenda for the meeting was democratically generated. These agendas are often address to things viewed as highly important and then goes all the way down to items on the list, which is viewed, as less important. So this sounded like something we can bring to our Testing Team meetings!! As quickly as the podcast began, Allen began to dive into real Software testing concepts. He began by emphasizing the great difference that lies between testing and quality. With constant changes and improvising’s, system and program bugs quickly lose values. Finding bugs on constantly or sometimes daily changing software does not constitute to the quality level of the software product. This is because today’s bug can be fixed in tomorrows code implementation and that can also create a new bug that could be fixed with the next program/code modification. Now here is the case that is it the Job of software testers to find bugs and errors in the program. Now it’s the job of a test manager to schedule test runs and passes for the specific product in development. How do you think a test manager could work successfully an environment where code changes and modifications are being made on a daily base? The proposed solution goes back to the beginning of the project where planning and thoughts have to be put in place. To put forth a great product, time allocation for testing has to be incurred in the project timeline. You can put out quality without considering all aspects of possible challenges and inputs.
From the blog CS@Worcester – Le Blog Spot by houtyr and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.