notes and views on crm, social media, and the human side of information technology

Testing: not a service but a way of doing things

Johanna Rothman reminds us that testing is not a service but an integral part of development. I would go even further and say that testing is - or should be - excercised regularly at every stage of a software project, and not only there. Testing provides the much-needed touch of reality for our goal-driven activitites. That’s to say, as soon as we define goals, we need to test that they are both desirable and attainable, then devise ways to reach them and again, test them, and so forth.

When testing is left to testers, the following will happen:

  • the analyst won’t bother reality-checking the requirements
  • the programmer will be casual about the quality and robustness of his code
  • the business folks won’t start reviewing the product until it’s been developed

It’s much more costly to change things at the end of the project that at the beginning, and it’s been the agile methodologies that have tried to answer that by giving everybody involved an early look at the product being developed. But that’s not enough. Before a project is conceived, there is a business need that’s supposed to be satisfied, and quite often its importance is sadly overrated.

The biggest tragedy of failing enterprise projects isn’t that they aren’t delivered on time or on budget. It’s that they’ve been started at all.

Sometimes, there’s too much money and too little time to think it over.

Additional reading

May 17, 2007 | Filed Under Software delivery 

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