James Whittaker, test engineering director at Google, talked yesterday at the Agile Cambridge conference on how Google does ‘Test Engineering’. He likened software testing to healthcare – in particular patient care in hospitals. Whittaker started by saying that software development was like manufacturing 20 years ago, and that the cost of fixing problems after a release was much higher than before software was released. “We don’t do software like this any more”, said Whittaker, adding that “You could be using Google docs and it will update under you and you won’t even know it”. Whittaker concluded that the amount of time it takes to fix a bug before and after shipping for their software is now absolutely the same (note “amount of time”, not cost). Instead of fixing mistakes early and building quality in from the beginning, Whittaker suggested looking at a software system as a patient in hospital care. “Testing is like healthcare, an ongoing process”, said he, adding that effective hospital care requires physicians to quickly assess the state of a patient. For that, they use patient charts, which give them a history of disease and treatment, and monitors, which give them visibility over key vital signs such as heart rate. “I don’t have a clipboard to tell me where are the problems and the life support monitor”, said Whittaker. As a test engineering director, he said that this information was available to him but in several SQL databases which he had to query manually, so he set his team the task of making him run less SQL queries. As a result, the development teams at Google have introduced several tools which provide the functionality of the patient charts and health monitors. (But have luckily avoided the “get the most expensive machine, in case the administrator comes problem”).
Attributes-Capabilities-Components
The company policy is that anyone can look at any test cases regardless of whether they own the related product or not. They created a tool called Testify that makes statements about the health of their products based on test cases and execution results. It also assists them in providing a historical view of diagnostics. Read more: Gojko Adzic
Attributes-Capabilities-Components
The company policy is that anyone can look at any test cases regardless of whether they own the related product or not. They created a tool called Testify that makes statements about the health of their products based on test cases and execution results. It also assists them in providing a historical view of diagnostics. Read more: Gojko Adzic
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment