The Journey to Testing Improvements
Pass or Fail. That is the world most people in the software quality domain live in. Things are either broken or not. Sometimes they are in between those states, however they almost always lean either to being broken or not broken and just simply misunderstood. So testing by nature has a bias towards a binary perspective.
At Duo we have a very healthy testing culture where the testing process is shared, agreed upon, and executed by the Engineering department as a whole. This healthy environment pushes most testing projects to the realm of improving the testing process rather than execution. This can prove challenging because testing in general has that binary component to it (remember pass or fail?). However using Duo engineering principles we worked to improve the quality of our Windows integration through incremental changes.
I hope after reading this example you will take to heart the challenge: When looking to improve quality, the temptation to deliver perfect testing must not inhibit the delivery of better testing. In many ways this project (like countless others in quality) was quite the journey, and every journey has a beginning so let’s look at the start.
What Was Our Destination?
To improve testing we really needed to know two things to get started. What was the current state of testing and what was the future state of testing that we desired? During our project to improve the testing of our Windows integration, we analyzed the existing testing which was, as expected, very good. The product had a healthy amount of automated tests that covered several key features. There were also plenty of thorough manual tests that covered the remaining set of features for this product. In addition there were scripts to create environments and resources to test all of the Windows Operating Systems that Duo supported with this integration.
There were of course a few key areas that we identified needing improvement. We needed to convert approximately 67 manual tests to automated tests to reduce testing time and increase the speed of release for new features. We needed to consolidate the automated test execution. Initially the automated tests required multiple manual actions to run the tests.
Ultimately we needed to get these tests executing more often in our continuous integr
[…]
Content was cut in order to protect the source.Please visit the source for the rest of the article.
Read the original article: Incremental Deliverables From a Quality Perspective