Testers

[original PM]

Agree re deadlines being more aggressive but I think that is a fall out of bobification.

The key is to get the code into testing within the SLA - if it is then sh*t, so what - the deadline of getting the code in for testing has been met so job done.

In addition the tighter deadlines have meant you need more than one developer on the same parts of the code and thus need to merge code which means the developers individual unit tests may have passed on their own but not together.

Still as long as everyone agrees testing is mandatory we should get along just fine!

[The Spartan]

I do agree deadlines are becoming more and more unrealistic to the point no one actually seems to expect people to meet them any more. It is just in my experience new releases tend to have more regression problems than they used to.

Having said that, it does vary and some are much better than others. Also environmental and deployment problems come into play as well.

Which is why automated testing and CI are more important than ever before, releases are happening more frequently. Unfortunately here at clientco they're just letting testers leave and trying to model their testing on that of Facebook. Thing is though this is an online retail business and I tend to think of Facebook as the exception and not the rule when it comes to testing.

[original PM]

Which is why automated testing and CI are more important than ever before, releases are happening more frequently. Unfortunately here at clientco they're just letting testers leave and trying to model their testing on that of Facebook. Thing is though this is an online retail business and I tend to think of Facebook as the exception and not the rule when it comes to testing.

Facebook is b0llox as a business tool

50% of accounts are fake, 10% are for someones dog and 5% are for someones cat.

[eek]

Which is why automated testing and CI are more important than ever before, releases are happening more frequently. Unfortunately here at clientco they're just letting testers leave and trying to model their testing on that of Facebook. Thing is though this is an online retail business and I tend to think of Facebook as the exception and not the rule when it comes to testing.

They can't be. Facebook have a full regression test prior to deployment. They allow new functionality to reach live with little testing but as issues are found the items are fixed and tests added to the regression test.

Just because someone thinks they know how the methodology works doesn't mean that is the actual case....

[GlenSausio]

They can't be. Facebook have a full regression test prior to deployment. They allow new functionality to reach live with little testing but as issues are found the items are fixed and tests added to the regression test.

Just because someone thinks they know how the methodology works doesn't mean that is the actual case....

Interesting, they don't have a QA team according to this guy:

What kind of automated testing does Facebook do? - Quora

They have their engineers write and maintain their own tests.

[original PM]

I am not really sure Facebook and Facebooks testing model can map across to the real world...


Oh no testing did not work and dumbslut69 cannot post her most recent duck face pic - not exactly gonna grind the world to a halt is it?

(although as I write this I have a horrible feeling it would.!)

[GlenSausio]

In addition the tighter deadlines have meant you need more than one developer on the same parts of the code and thus need to merge code which means the developers individual unit tests may have passed on their own but not together.

Each developer must integrate changes back from the branch into his sandbox and make sure all the unit tests play nice, before he does his commit. This extra step helps avoid the problem you mention.

When teams have a good regression capability they skip this and hope the CI catches these integration issues.

[BlasterBates]

The fact is you can do it either way, you can have the testers do it or you can get the devs to do it.

The thing is if you have testers then if the devs test like the testers do it, you effectively duplicate the testing and it "takes too long", i.e. when there is QA testing the dev is under pressure to get it out so that QA can start testing. So in a way it's a self fullfilling prophecy that devs don't test properly.

[Cenobite]

What would you recommend someone considering a career change to IT look into as far as programming languages go?

I just wouldn't get into programming: because it's been offshored so much, there are now better paid jobs which have stayed onshore such as business analysis and a lot of testing.

However, if you must then you have to go for the programming languages which are hard to learn such as those which are functional (Clojure) or deal with hard topics such as concurrency (Scala). I found it was functional and multithreaded programming which really separated the good programmers from the merely average. You've got to be in the top quarter of your peer group on the course to be in with a chance.

But remember that programming languages come and go and it's hard to convince an agent that you have transferable skills. Instead consider OSs like UNIX which have been around for the long haul, or perhaps a language like JavaScript.

[original PM]

Each developer must integrate changes back from the branch into his sandbox and make sure all the unit tests play nice, before he does his commit. This extra step helps avoid the problem you mention.

When teams have a good regression capability they skip this and hope the CI catches these integration issues.

Yes in an ideal world but as I was saying it is about getting stuff into test by date X.

And so to ensure you hit that all the 'nice to have' parts get dumped as you have to get the code into test.

So each developer does his code and signs that off as ready - as it is - the fact it does not integrate with other developers code is not something he alone can test.