attn software people

[marquee]

asking software engineers mostly.. how important do you think the software testing phase of software development is? is it necessary to devote time and resources to coming up with test plans, and hiring people solely for the purpose of testing?

or do you think people who become software testers are just people who just arent talented enough to be a real programmer, so they end up just testing.

 

[conjur]

Depends on the size of the project. If you're designing, say, a portal or some sort of ERP application (a major undertaking), then not having a QA dept or procedure would be insane.

And, no, software testers/QA Analysts are not programmers who couldn't hack it. In fact, it's sometimes best to not have programmers doing it but rather someone who would even use the application incorrectly but can still document the process rather well.

 

[DurocShark]

Depends on the target audience. If it's all power users/techs, you might be able to get away with minimal functionality testing. If it's end lusers, you need to test the piss out of it.

 

[Zombie]

We are a very small company and it all engineers are resposible for their own QA but everybody here wishes we could affoard a dedicated QA person.

I have to agree with conjur. I would want a software guy do a QA cause that will save time for the engineers.

 

[Zombie]

Originally posted by: DurocShark
Depends on the target audience. If it's all power users/techs, you might be able to get away with minimal functionality testing. If it's end lusers, you need to test the piss out of it.

I have to disagree. No matter who the audience is if your program keeps crapping out and does not meet the user expectation then users will either stop using your product or worse move to a competitor.

 

[Jzero]

or do you think people who become software testers are just people who just arent talented enough to be a real programmer, so they end up just testing.

No way. Software testing requires a talent and patience all its own. I happen to be adept at testing software and spotting code errors. Which is a shame b/c I find QA to be a dreadfully boring task.

 

[beyonddc]

Originally posted by: marquee
asking software engineers mostly.. how important do you think the software testing phase of software development is? is it necessary to devote time and resources to coming up with test plans, and hiring people solely for the purpose of testing?

or do you think people who become software testers are just people who just arent talented enough to be a real programmer, so they end up just testing.

I say Software Testing is very important in the development cycle. It requires in-depth knowledge of the project in-order to create a good test plan, so that answered your question a software tester is not talented.

QA people often requires to write drivers to test the software also, so it does requires a lot of programming.

 

[OulOat]

All good software engineers are good software testers. Not all good software testers are good software engineers

Unit tests are very important in any decent to large scale projects with multiple coders. The software testing phase is spread throughout the entire project. You need to verify that code works before you integrate into the project and it still works after you integrate, plus the project still has to work afterwards. If you are talking about fuctional tests after the project is "done" coding, it necessary for any professional products.

 

[djNickb]

Its very important. I work for a software company and a recent release that somehow passed QA that was packaged with InstallShield for some reason blows away the hardware abstraction layer .dll on any machine that it was installed on. So yes testing is very very important.

 

[marquee]

Originally posted by: Jzero

or do you think people who become software testers are just people who just arent talented enough to be a real programmer, so they end up just testing.

No way. Software testing requires a talent and patience all its own. I happen to be adept at testing software and spotting code errors. Which is a shame b/c I find QA to be a dreadfully boring task.

well i guess we can agree some QA needs to be done, but then, how much is enough and how much is overkill? no matter how good your QA is, there's always a chance that some weird configuration out in the field will cause your software to stop working. i guess my question is, do you merely test functionality, or do you try to test against weird scenarios that might happen, and do you test against users who might unintentionally press a series of keys that dont quite make sense but might crap out the program because of it.

 

[Ameesh]

Its very important and probably the most neglected part of software development.

 

[Rage187]

I work in SQA.

We get 1 hour of test time to 1 hour of development.

We do the testing because most software engineers are to busy to even try and see if what they wrote, works.


16 engineers and 12 testers.



You down with TTP?

Yeah you know me!

 

[Argo]

Originally posted by: conjur
Depends on the size of the project. If you're designing, say, a portal or some sort of ERP application (a major undertaking), then not having a QA dept or procedure would be insane.

And, no, software testers/QA Analysts are not programmers who couldn't hack it. In fact, it's sometimes best to not have programmers doing it but rather someone who would even use the application incorrectly but can still document the process rather well.

As a software engineer with over 3 years of experience I second everything conjur said.

 

[Rage187]

"there's always a chance that some weird configuration out in the field will cause your software to stop working."


Thats why we created a BETAMATRIX of all the settings are customers use. This way we cover the most used configurations, then try the not so usual.

We also follow te 80-20 philphosophy, 80% of your customers use 20% of the features.



"i guess my question is, do you merely test functionality, or do you try to test against weird scenarios that might happen, and do you test against users who might unintentionally press a series of keys that dont quite make sense but might crap out the program because of it. "


All of the above. We smoke test, and black box.

Although most of our time is spent testing SR2 releases and new beta software.




Our worst problem right now is that HQA is lacking alot of people so we have been doing ALOT of hardware testing with new products.

 

[ggavinmoss]

Originally posted by: Ameesh
Its very important and probably the most neglected part of software development.

I agree completely, but that isn't to say that testing isn't full of people that couldn't hack it as programmers. It's sad that such a necessary part of software development has a bad wrap.

-geoff

 

[ManSnake]

At my company, you start out as a software tester (writing test scripts, performing unit/system tests), once you have proved yourself, then you move on into software design.

 

[FeathersMcGraw]

Originally posted by: marquee
asking software engineers mostly.. how important do you think the software testing phase of software development is? is it necessary to devote time and resources to coming up with test plans, and hiring people solely for the purpose of testing?

Software systems are complex. Formal test plans mitigate complexity by forcing requirements to the forefront before code is written. Whether those test plans are executed by a group besides the developers is really up to the management team, but writing anything non-trivial without a testing strategy in place is just asking for piles of defects and future maintenance headaches.

 

[Rage187]

Heres a tip: be nice to your testers, we have power to make you work on weekends.


Programmer ticks me off, I hold my bugs back till thursday-friday, then enter them all.

Enjoy your saturday at work n00b!




I never went to college, I just worked in the gaming industry for 8 years, then I applied for a field tech position, then worked my way up to SQA.


Heres another tip: some of us make more than programmers.

 

[marquee]

Originally posted by: Rage187
Heres a tip: be nice to your testers, we have power to make you work on weekends.


Programmer ticks me off, I hold my bugs back till thursday-friday, then enter them all.

Enjoy your saturday at work n00b!

 

[Rage187]

Its about the only real power we hold, with great power comes great responsibility.






Engineers do it to us too, we always seem to get new builds on friday that have to be regressed by monday.





Alls fair in love and software.

 

[Argo]

Originally posted by: Rage187
Heres a tip: be nice to your testers, we have power to make you work on weekends.


Programmer ticks me off, I hold my bugs back till thursday-friday, then enter them all.

Enjoy your saturday at work n00b!

I dunno about your company, but at mine if SQA engineer enters the PRs on friday I'll just wait until Monday to fix them. There is no rule that all PRs have to be fixed by the end of the week That being said, I'm nice to everybody, regardless of what department they work for.

 

[Rage187]

^ we have a magic wand.


If we list the bug as a B item (Beta item) then it has to be fixed right then and there.

 

[johnjbruin]

Originally posted by: Rage187

Alls fair in love and software.

nice

 

[Spamela]

depends. do you actually like having to stop work on interesting things so
that you can work late fixing your (or some other person's) stuff?

it's critical to have them. our SQA people are more like "power users," than developers,
but also do configuration management. it's not a job i want to do, but i'm glad
it gets done.

 

[EngenZerO]

Yes its very important.