Question

you are a new programmer in your software development shop.This shop does not believe in designing or test plan development.You are told to start cording and test whatever you think should be tested. What is your honest thought on this?

Answer 1

My thoughts on this question is,

For any software development company whether big or small, there are mainly 3 testing practices:

1. Unit Testing - where individual code is tested in units
2. Integration Testing - where code from multiple developers are integrated to prepare a software module
3. System Testing - where the prepared fully tested modules are integrated and tested altogether.

As a new programmer in the software company, as he is told to start coding right away, he/she should be doing unit testing process very sincerely. It is highly good practice to keep your code error free and create unit tests so that whenever you're commiting a new change to your code, these unit tests will run automatically to test your class/method/component. Few unit testing practices that should be followed by a new programmer are:

• Functionality testing - whether the code is performing the task defined
• Debugging and review - reviewing the code multiple times so that it follows all standards
• Create unit tests - unit tests are helpful as they can test automatically when there's a change in main code.

Other testing like integration testing, system testing is duty of other testers (QA Team) in the company who have an overall idea what the software that is going to be released is all about. This overall knowledge is limited to an individual programmer as he/she is not involved in all the phases of software development, for eg: requirement analysis. As an individual, delivering functional, error free code is the main concern.

It is specified in the question that "the shop does not believe in designing and creating test plans". This approach is difficult when the company work on medium-large projects, as each module is tackled step by step over a course of months to deliver the final product. Different developers commit their code of their assigned tasks to sourcecode repository which is ideally to be tested together to make all the related files/modules working combinedly. No software development model fits in the approach of the shop as testing is an integral of every software development lifecycle.

Creating a test plan makes software development easier for small-big projects as a test plans helps to:

• identify which features to be revised, tested again
• any broken code that needs to fixed for smooth release
• enhancing communication between developers, stakeholders, managers etc.
• revsing and incorporating features into the product.

The approach followed by the software development shop is wrong according to good software development practices and it also makes them incapable of taking big projects in future.

Hope this answer gives an insight to the importance of testing in software development.