Software QA FYI - SQAFYI

Improving Software Quality

By: Lindsey Vereen

Getting testers, developers to work together signals a sea change in industry’s approach to fixing errors

Since 1968 end users have come to depend more on software, and their expectations for product quality have risen dramatically. Moreover, the pace of development has accelerated in the new millennium, thanks to the Internet, competition and the tools developers use. It is easier to write Java code and port it than it ever was to write C code and port it. The crop of rapid prototyping languages—scripting languages—like Python, Perl and Ruby makes it easy to build Web sites quickly. Databases have become commodities and don’t need to be reinvented each time.

“QA is still a challenge, still generally left to the end, and the staff is treated as second-class citizens,” said Ed Hirgelt, manager of services development for Quest Software. However, because of the speed of development and time-to-market requirements, QA is becoming more visible. Test-driven development moves testing to earlier in the life cycle. Tools like JUnit and Ant make it easier to run tests as part of the nightly build process. The concept of a continuous build is helping produce reliable software.

Hirgelt characterizes a continuous build process as one in which a build is initiated when a developer commits code back to the source repository. The product is built and tests run automatically. Problems are caught sooner rather than later.

QA also has been changing as the result of such factors as the wind-down following Y2K and the subsequent business decline. As software companies faced hard times, one solution was to improve efficiency by hiring the most skilled testers available and automating as much testing as possible, according to Elfriede Dustin, internal SQA consultant for global security services at Symantec.

The loss of jobs following the dot-com implosion meant software companies went from having to hire practically anyone with a pulse in the late 1990s to the luxury of choosing from only the most highly qualified candidates. That change has affected who is being hired for QA positions. In some large companies, “coding skills are what you are judged and hired by, with testing skills coming in a distant second,” said Duri Price of Exceed Training, who has worked in the software QA field since 1992. Jeff Feldstein, who manages a team of 35 test engineers at Cisco Systems, concurred. He hires software engineers exclusively, and then sells them on test engineering.

“Testers need to be involved from the beginning of the development life cycle,” said Symantec’s Dustin. More important, however, is that so much depends on the developers’ skills. The most efficient and knowledgeable testers cannot succeed if developers implement bad software or ineffective software development life cycles and processes are in place. If testing is the only quality phase implemented as part of the QA process, it can at most be considered a Band-Aid often too late in the development life cycle to make much of a quality difference. Testing is only one piece of the quality puzzle.

Agile Methods

The growing influence of agile processes has had direct and indirect consequences on quality. With the advent of Extreme Programming (XP) and the agile movement, testing has become more of a developer activity, said Dustin. Agile methodologies have provided a model for moving testing forward and putting more of the responsibility in the hands of developers.

“With the onset of agile methodologies comes the concept of test-driven development, which was introduced with Extreme Programming,” said Bob Galen, a senior QA manager at Thomson-Dialog. The principle is to design tests before designing code, usually using a unit-testing framework such as JUnit or xUnit to help support the practice. Test-driven development has gone beyond XP to become a mainstream development practice, he noted. “It has also sensitized a new generation of software developers on the importance of and skills required to properly test software.”

Testers are getting better code and can’t simply repeat the same tests as the development team. Galen said they must find other value areas, such as getting involved at the front end with requirement definition and acceptance test development, working in parallel with the development teams, and at the back end working with the customer to run the acceptance testing and doing performance and load testing or usability testing.

Not everyone is convinced that agile processes are the answer. Dustin said she doubts that Extreme Programming can work in a development effort larger than 10 or so developers. Feldstein’s group hasn’t embraced agile methodologies (though he acknowledged that they have been used successfully elsewhere in Cisco) because he doesn’t see them as a way to get high-quality software, but as a way to get software fast. “It’s not clear that agile puts quality at the forefront,” he said. “Getting it out quickly isn’t a priority for us. Getting it right is.”

At the Cisco facility where Feldstein works, testers become involved during the development of the product requirements document. “Marketing, development and test are all equal in the team, and they all get involved early on,” he explained. The whole team owns the quality, and the whole team decides when to ship. The process is requirements-driven, he said, and they don’t need test-driven development. He also noted that the processes are constantly being refined.

“Once developers have committed to a schedule, which occurs when the functionality spec is complete,” he said, “they tell you what the API looks like. We can start coding simultaneously. We do unit testing on the test software.” When a stand-alone component is complete, it’s handed off for functional and performance testing. A stand-alone component is complete after developers have done unit testing, and integration testing between components, and have established baseline performance.

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Improving Software Quality