One of the hardest tasks for any IT department is that of testing.
This is, in my experience, the area where we have the greatest
failures (next to estimating the cost and length of a project) and
where we have incredibly room for improvement.
Your
standards would state that all buffers must be checked for overrun
conditions, URLs in a valid format, and so on. The standards apply
to ALL testing, while the specifications apply to the specific
program or system. A very critical fact (which seems to be completely unknown to Microsoft) is the marketing department is not in charge of
testing.
You also cannot make a hundred thousand copies of a product and
send it out to tens of thousands of beta testers without a clear
set of goals, expert supervision and constant management and
expect to get anything meaningful back.Marketing is an essential part of a product plan, but it has absolutely no place in the testing plan. What are some of the common testing mistakes?
Testing to prove a program or system works – I know you want
your programs to work, but the purpose of testing is simply to
test, not to prove you are the best programmer on the planet.
Trying to prove a program does not work – Again, the purpose of
testing is to test, not to prove anything. You should always have
a well defined testing plan and follow that plan.
Once design is done prototypes should be thrown away and not used
again. Using testing to design performance – Performance goals must be
understood before a project leaves the design phase. By the time a
project is implemented (much less tested) you should completely
know how it will perform (minus the possibility of bad
programming, which is a different problem which testing is
designed to uncover).Testing will, however, validate that the
product does perform as indicated in the specifications.
Testing without a test plan – I don’t know how many programmers
I’ve seen that just wade right in and start testing. Come on
people, how can you test something if you don’t have a plan? What
are you trying to prove?
Testing without a specification – Remember, the purpose of
testing is to prove that a system or program meets the
specifications. That’s all. It’s very difficult to do that
without a specification right in front of you. First of all, programmers make lousy testers -
testing is a field all to itself and programmers are almost never
trained well in this area. Second, the developers of a system have
a conflict of interest – they want their software to work. Testers
need to approach with a more open mind.
Expecting an unsupervised beta testing group to do anything meaningful – Beta testers need well defined goals, constant supervision and strong leadership to be successful. Without these
things beta testing is simply a numbers game which does nothing
useful at all.
You want to find out if your
users will like a feature? Create a prototype, send it to a
statistically valid sample audience and ask them for their
opinions. Clearly define it to the audience as a prototype and
survey them for their opinions afterwards. Don’t send out a poorly
defined “beta test” to a hundred thousand people and try and get
their opinions on features. The only thing you are going to
accomplish is to get yourself slammed in the media. You also find
yourself making design changes in a product at the wrong stage of
the product life cycle. Design changes need to be made during the
analysis and design phases of the project, not AFTER
implementation.
Richard Lowe Jr. is the webmaster of Internet Tips And Secrets
at http://www.internet-tips.net.
So how is good testing done?
His concept of design was to spend an hour
or two asking the customer what was needed, then to start coding,
then to show the customer, make changes, code some more, show the
customer, make changes and so on until the customer said “it’s
fine”. Needless to say, the project took far longer than necessary
and did not do a great job of meeting the customers needs. It was
also very buggy and required an immense amount of support during
the first couple of years of it’s life cycle.
The only phase where the marketing department should be involved
is analysis – A well trained analyst understands that the
marketing department is a customer and must be included in the
analysis phase of the project. This is the only time (until the
product is through testing) that marketing should have any input.
If you don’t follow this rule you will wind up with a product
which changes direction during testing, and thus invalidates your
test.
What does this really mean? It simply means that changes to the
design are only allowed during the analysis and design phase.
Period. If your customer changes anything at all after the
analysis and design, you must reanalyze, redesign and
renegotiate – always and without fail.
This seems pretty simple so you say “sure”. Wrong
thing to do. You should say either “let’s finish the project as
designed then add things” or “okay, we will need to stop, see how
that effects the project (at the customers cost), then we will
submit a cost and new delivery date”.
Maintain standards – Testing measures the implementation against
the specifications and standards. Standards should be made known
to the customer as part of the entire package. These might include
things like all fields will be validated in specific ways, all
buffers will not overflow, screens will have a certain look and so
on.
Remember the purpose of testing – Testing should prove the
implementation meets everything included in the specifications and
standards. Testing does NOT mean the product is measured against
customer expectations (that’s a marketing function which should
have been nailed down during the analysis and design phase). You
see, the specification MUST meet the customer expectations before
implementation beings. Then the final product WILL meet customer
expectations as the specification is the expectation.
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                          seo expert
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