Sunday, July 30, 2006

Real world experiences: Programmers love writing tests… well, not in this town.

The main idea behind unit testing is validate that every module or class is working properly; the procedure is to write test cases (yes, code it) for all methods so that whenever a change causes a regression, it can be quickly identified and fixed…
Well this sounds great! But sometimes it just doesn’t work too easy in a real web development scenario: real sites with billion pages views and with business requirement changing 5 times daily for only one coded class.

If we search for testing best practices we will quickly find the different testing types: Integration, Function, Unit, Acceptance and Regression.
Every web developer or web project manager knows that we should to apply some of these practices to get a successful project (in terms of QA, integration and functionality), and of course, we will need a combination of them to achieve our success, lets take an example to clarify this: we wont be happy with a bunch of classes working well separately (maybe programmers will be happy) because what we need is the whole puzzle finished (business requirements), if one piece is missed or its broken we (as Web Project Manager) will fail.

So, if you will face a real web project be prepared to apply and integrate many testing methods with an opened minded approach. You should know that the key will be to accept the change in a constantly changing environment, with or without unit testing.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

see updated comments here..