Testing has been on my mind recently. In fact I did an overview presentation and discussion for the company. I decided to do a “get everyone on the same page” type of presentation. Wasn’t what everyone expected, but I thought it was needed to be clear about terms and meanings. I now need to take it to the next need and discuss how the current tests match the different categories and where improvement can be targeted. Combine this with the lean software engineering concepts, and I should have a good start.
Now to the thoughts! I have been thinking that now only are there differents categories of tests; programmer, unit, regression, acceptance, etc. But there are levels within these categories. I am thinking these levels are like thresholds, where if you just wrote a new function or fixed a bug, you would run all tests. If you are just testing out a new platform or environment, maybe you would just run a level of tests that has caused problems in the past or tests that are known to identify targeted problems. Another level might be a configuration type, which tests different configurations within the same environment.
Of course, the task for me is to take an existing growing test base, which has been successful and propose a different way of doing things more efficiently. WITHOUT losing confidence in results.
An associate, who is the test engineer for the group, is doing a great job improving the existing testing environment! I hoping to attack the issues from the bottom, and get the individual tests or test groups to be available real-time. Maybe using a Tomcat server and ajax for web reporting of the results. This is where my idea of levels enter the picture!
I will report my experience soon,
Allen