Is Software Testing Dead?

The opening keynote of the Google Test Automation Conference 2011 was presented by Alberto Savoia, Director of Engineering at Google who discusses the proposition that software testing is dead. He suggest that software testers should shift their mindset from “Are we building it right?” to “Are we building the right it?”. The idea that it is more important to have a context where the right software product is developed, instead of setting quality procedures that verify the product at the end.

Building the Right Scope

Use cases, user stories, or backlog items already define broadly the scope of a project. Many teams consider requirements as something provided by the business users, product owners or customers. Asking business users to provide the scope is effectively relying on someone who has no experience designing software solutions to give us a high level solution design. This article explains how project teams can work together with business users to come up with the right scope. To reach this goal, you need to start with business goals, and not with user stories, and derive the scope from that.

.NET Mocking Frameworks

Dependencies management is a difficult part of test-driven development (TDD). Mocks and stubs are created to isolate the behavior we would like to test. The article “The Art of Mocking” is a good introduction on this topic. Creating all these testing classes by hand can lead to troubles, but several open source tools to apply mocking principles in .NET. Tools like Rhino Mocks and Moq allow us to create mocks and stubs within our test method. The Mocking Frameworks in .NET video presents techniques that can  automate your unit testing process.

Agile Requirements

The clarity of requirements is an issue for many  software development projects. Based on a course on Agile Requirements, this article at summarizes the levels of Agile (and frankly non Agile) requirements and how you can use a four step process for gathering them.

Load Testing Automation

The article “Scenarios for Load Testing” by Christopher Merrill discusses how to build a portfolio of scenarios to automate your software load testing activity. You have rarely only a single scenario to test, so you have to decide which scenarios to include in your test plans. Criticality, frequency, difficulty and verifiability are the four key factors that should be considered to determine the load testing scenarios to automate.

Read the article: Scenarios for Load Testing