Nowadays, Testing is made with frequently changing software under the determined time stress of short iterations in iterative delivery environment. With the understanding of basics of testing, we could not handle the incremental iterations. So, whichever domain you are in, it’s always important to make a pause and hear from the experienced people for ideas.
While we are in the process of improving our testing activities, we referred couple of books and this book named “50 Quick Ideas To Improve Your Tests” by authors Gojko Adzic, David Evans and Tom Roden seems to be interesting and got it from here .The ideas in the book gives plenty of problem solving tips on how to organize the work better. And these ideas are useful not only for the testers but also for Analysts & Developers.
The book contains almost fifty ideas. Let us together look into one specific idea here in my blog. I have here quoted the same sentences as in the book just to highlight this idea from the book mentioned above.
Make developers responsible for checking
Many organizations start with test automation as an auxiliary activity – it needs to be done, but without interrupting the development schedule. This often leads to test automation specialists working after development, or even entire teams of people charged with making testing faster and cheaper. This is a false economic premise, and can lead to a lot of trouble later on.
By decoupling development and test automation, teams either introduce a lot of duplicated work or unnecessarily delay feedback. Manually running all the tests during development is rarely sustainable, so development can officially finish without any serious testing . If a developer receives feedback about potential problems only after a different team automates tests, the code that needs to be fixed might have been modified by some other people meanwhile. This introduces a further delay, because developers need to coordinate more and research other potential changes to fix problems.
In addition, when specialists are hired to automate tests, they are often overwhelmed by work. Ten developers can produce a lot more code than a single person can test, so specialist automation often introduces a bottleneck.
Test automation specialists often use tools that developers are not familiar with, so it is not easy for them to ask for help from the rest of the team.The only economically sustainable way of writing and automating hundreds of tests is to make developers responsible for doing it. Avoid using specialist groups and test automation experts. Give people who implement functionality the responsibility to execute tests
Key Benefits
- When the same people are responsible for implementing and changing code and automating the related tests, tests are generally automated a lot more reliably and execute much faster
- When developers are responsible for automation, they will design the system to make it easy to control and observe functionality in the first place.
- When developers are responsible for test automation, the tests will deliver fast feedback.
How to make it work
- Developers should be responsible for automating the tests, but the entire team (including business stakeholders and testers) should be involved in deciding what needs to be tested.
- Teams without test automation experience should not hire automation experts to take on the work.
- External experts should only be hired to teach developers how to use a particular tool for automation.
So I’m happy to share this specific idea from the book. This book will help us to fix the problems we are facing during the delivery of system on timeline. These ideas will help the teams to resolve problems and improve the techniques for effective testing. I hope that this blog will help you to start improvise your Ideas too.
I’d be keen to hear more from you all about the ideas that comes into your mind while reading this blog as how to even improve our testing process. Your comments are much appreciated! 🙂
