Comments on: Plan, plan, plan…

By: Zoltán Mátyás

Zoltán Mátyás — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 22:31:50 +0000

You are right. I just wanted to emphasize that only creating unit tests in a huge projects with several modules is not enough, but management can force it to be enough unfortunatelly . They think that unit and by hand testing is the same, and pay for the cheaper one .

By: Lóránd Somogyi - » Plan, plan, plan part II: What you don’t need

Lóránd Somogyi - » Plan, plan, plan part II: What you don’t need — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 20:29:13 +0000

[...] first part was about technical feature planning. Here, I’m about to write a bit about the very start of the [...]

By: lsomogyi

lsomogyi — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 19:59:10 +0000

Thanks Zoltán! You’re quite right. Testing and QA are important at any stage of the software. The management should always take in account testing and other QA tasks, – hopefully – as planed. Good QA has a really good ROI on long run.
On the other hand I tend to keep with automated tests as long as I can. In my opinion good automation is the basis of a good software. Of course there are situations when you just can not automate, and you must test by hand.

By: Zoltán Mátyás

Zoltán Mátyás — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 09:25:04 +0000

Forgot to talk about lies . Lies can kill any project no matter if your methodology and planning was great. Forcing good quality != producing good quality!

By: Zoltán Mátyás

Zoltán Mátyás — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 18:55:56 +0000

I totally agree the above thougths. One comment on testing: it should be as planned as the software itself. In a real life example I have seen that although the ratio of tested methods were very high the software could not even pass the first QGates. Management should always give time and money for testing (testing is not just writing unit tests but sometimes stopping development and just testing the new features). Also testers should participate in a project with all the architectural knowledge about the software. In my opinion (after participating in some projects ), it is a good way that periodically the development is stopped for a while and all the new features are hard tested by hand, because here all the changes are known and very annoying errors can be eliminated that later are hard to debug/correct. These stops also can be used for performance enhancements. For managers, after this stops very nice ppt slideshows/demos can be shown so they can be convinced that this is worth .