Kick-starting a development project with a solid testing approach - a 5 step process to ensure quality

Ask a developer about their feelings about testing and you can elicit a huge spectrum of opinions:

• "It's someone else's responsibility"
• "Unit testing is the way forward"
• "Manual testing gets the best results"
• "You can't make the software better through testing!"

Above are all things I've heard people say when talking about testing. However it is such a broad subject and we tend to focus on a very specific aspect of it (e.g. unit tests or manual tests) and we can sometimes miss the big picture. When kick-starting a new product or project, it's vital that you think about various aspects of testing up front - here's my 5 step approach to ensure you have quality software right from the beginning:
 

1. Test input early in software lifecycle. You need to think about testing as early in the project as you can. When looking at designs, for example, you should think about negative tests and edge cases to help guide your design decision process. If you have testers within your team then this is great and you should get them involved in the design; if you don't have test resource the developers need to take on this mantle (they should also do this if there are testers involved in the project). Testing then happens as the software is developed with close interactions between the testers and developers and quick feedback loops. This is a very agile approach which works really well. Leaving testing until the last minute just doesn't work. Getting them involved early also allows them to start writing test scripts which is important for step 3.
2. Automated test environment setups. A huge mistake people can make is leaving the test team to spend hours setting up test environments for every set of tests they do. This is such a waste - for every 1 hour spent testing you can easily burn 7 hours doing server and data setup. Investment in automated deployments for test purposes early on is a time well spent. There are also some really good by-products of emphasising this at the start of a project; you start to think about how the software would be deployed, how it would be upgraded potentially, how you load data into the system and also helps you consider your installation times. You will want it to be as efficient and quick as possible so any benefits your test team gain from this, your customers will gain when your product goes out the door.
3. Manual test scripts. In modern software development people sometimes baulk at the idea of not just manual tests, but writing test scripts for this. However, there is no substitute for getting a real person do testing. They find things a system can't, they can pick up usability issues etc. By writing test scripts at the design stage, the test team can test the design or mock ups without any software needing to be developed. Things that are missed in the design can be picked up at this stage. The test scripts should be well structured and repeatable as the manual test scripts can then be used as a basis for automation test scripts. A huge by-product of well written test scripts is you can then scale up your test team when you need to (e.g. before release) with new people who are unfamiliar with the product as the tests should be detailed enough for them to step through. You can scale up using test resource from other teams in your organization, from outsourcing potentially, or even by getting your development team to run through the tests.
4. A path to automation. If done correctly, the manual test scripts will provide you a set of repeatable steps that are always tested with every release of the software. The automated test environment setups give you a one click ability to setup the system on which to run this test. If you automate this manual test and marry it up to run on the automated deployment, then you have a quick and easy path to having good automation coverage. You don't need to automate everything - in fact I'd just automate the core 20-50% of your product. The time saved here in the long term will be enormous. Every time a developer commits, you can spin up a new test environment and then run your automated tests; if the tests fails the test team do not even need to do anything with this build and hence do not waste any time. Efficiency starts to go through the roof.
5. Regular bug purges. A bad habit to fall into is to leave bugs for later, as you are adding a great new feature. This ends up with a big backlog of bugs and a lot of technical debt. If this is a long term project - avoid this at all costs. There are various approaches to keeping your bug count low; rotate a developer onto purely bug fixing every iteration, assign 20% of your iteration capacity just to bugs, make every 3rd or 4th iteration purely a bug fixing iteration. Do whatever of these suits but make sure you do it. With a good continuous integration system and automated deploys and tests, the chances of bad code and major defects creeping in decreases which should help to keep this figure low.

Of course there are various other things that need done when thinking about testing a product and it will vary depending on project size, team sizes and skillsets. However, following the five steps above as part of your development process will ensure you have a quality driven approach to your product.
How do you approach testing? Are there any other things that should be done in the initial stages of product development which are big wins? If so please leave a comment below.

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• Continuous integration is key
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Continuous integration is the key!

Continuous integration (CI) is a key component of any successful software development team - not just an agile team. Doing it right will bring the following benefits to your team:

• Provide automated builds of software for testers to pick up. 
• A common, repeatable platform to run tests (unit, integration, automated functional and performance tests).
• A place to run code quality tools (SonarQube, FxCop, StyleCop, JSHint etc)
• A place to create production build installers. 

There are various great tools for setting up continuous integration and you should spend time evaluating what will be best for your project. My personal favorites are: 

• Jenkins
• CruiseControl

It is imperative that an agile team devotes time early in their project to get their continuous integration system up and running early (sprint 1 or 2) to ensure they have a solid platform to run on. Ideally your continuous integration will run on every commit into your source control system so that the team gets immediate feedback - have the changes compiled, have the tests run, is the code quality good. In the past in teams I have configured our continuous integration system to play a siren out loud in the office if the build has broken. The public nature of a central build location ensures extra care is taken by each team member when submitting their changes. 

For continuous integration you will need the following infrastructure at a minimum:

• A server for builds, running the tests etc. 
• A source control system (e.g. GIT, SVN, CVS)

For larger projects you may scale this up to have multiple agents running builds and tests. 

A common mistake teams make when creating their CI system is to not share knowledge of its workings with enough team members. Ideally everyone needs to know how it works - from developers to testers. These things need maintenance now and again and you want to spread the load, and have multiple people who can pick up the task. 

Once your continuous integration environment is setup and successful, you then need to look at automatic deployment - I'll write a future blog for this. Automated or continuous deployment is the next logical extension of your CI environment where you automatically build a new version of the system for test purposes perhaps or even automatically updating your production environment depending on your project.  Again with a little up front effort, the long term benefits can be huge!