Well.. It is 20018. It's been a while that I wrote something in here. I'm still working as an SDET. There has been lots of progress in software development and software testing. Let me go over the change I've noticed over the several years since last I post (around 2014)
Even if many different companies adopting different development process or strategy, I still believe testing by itself much needed in the development process (code, test and deliver). I still see the value of the unit test, integration tests, e2e test, load/stress tests and etc. I guess Agile development is kind of norm and on top of that many teams wants to go Continuous Integration/Deployment in their development strategy. And there are many success stories about not having QA organization as part of their software development process.
I think the important question to ask is NOT who should do which kind of testing. Rather, which testing mechanism is placed for which part of development process. This seems obvious but I have not seen many cases where development team leader goes through the entire development process with the team and what kind of tests are required where.
Here is what I think the team should do.
First, the team (engineer leadership) should decide what kind of development process or strategy they are going to use including tests. This will cover from the code getting developed to the code being deployed to the production. All the necessary testing should be identified and decided.
Second, the team needs to confirm all the test infrastructure are all available for them to write and execute. Check if there is a way for developers to test all their new features and bug fixes confidently. Check if proper regression suites are defined and executed properly.
Third, the team should follow the process and do all the things defined for development effort and testing effort. And at the end of the cycle (whichever the team decides), evaluate the make improvement if necessary.
Now, who gets to do what would be up to the team. If QA team exist, you can allocate the work that QA team can do. But the main point is that development process has to come first and then dev team and QA team can take the necessary work to complete that.
Testing is important. All the necessary testing need to be done before going into production. It is just testing not dev team testing or QA team testing.
What about finding bugs? What about regressions caused by bug fixes or new features? I'll cover that on the next blog. But development process and testing associated with the process need to be defined and applied first.
Even if many different companies adopting different development process or strategy, I still believe testing by itself much needed in the development process (code, test and deliver). I still see the value of the unit test, integration tests, e2e test, load/stress tests and etc. I guess Agile development is kind of norm and on top of that many teams wants to go Continuous Integration/Deployment in their development strategy. And there are many success stories about not having QA organization as part of their software development process.
I think the important question to ask is NOT who should do which kind of testing. Rather, which testing mechanism is placed for which part of development process. This seems obvious but I have not seen many cases where development team leader goes through the entire development process with the team and what kind of tests are required where.
Here is what I think the team should do.
First, the team (engineer leadership) should decide what kind of development process or strategy they are going to use including tests. This will cover from the code getting developed to the code being deployed to the production. All the necessary testing should be identified and decided.
Second, the team needs to confirm all the test infrastructure are all available for them to write and execute. Check if there is a way for developers to test all their new features and bug fixes confidently. Check if proper regression suites are defined and executed properly.
Third, the team should follow the process and do all the things defined for development effort and testing effort. And at the end of the cycle (whichever the team decides), evaluate the make improvement if necessary.
Now, who gets to do what would be up to the team. If QA team exist, you can allocate the work that QA team can do. But the main point is that development process has to come first and then dev team and QA team can take the necessary work to complete that.
Testing is important. All the necessary testing need to be done before going into production. It is just testing not dev team testing or QA team testing.
What about finding bugs? What about regressions caused by bug fixes or new features? I'll cover that on the next blog. But development process and testing associated with the process need to be defined and applied first.
