Software QA FYI - SQAFYI

Introduction to Google Software Testing

By: James A. Whittaker

There is one question I get more than any other. Regardless of the country I am visiting or the conference I am attending, this one question never fails to surface. Even Nooglers ask it as soon as they emerge from new-employee orientation: “How does Google test software?”

I am not sure how many times I have answered that question or even how many different versions I have given, but the answer keeps evolving the longer time I spend at Google and the more I learn about the nuances of our various testing practices. I had it in the back of my mind that I would write a book and when Alberto, who likes to threaten to turn testing books into adult diapers to give them a reason for existence, actually suggested I write such a book, I knew it was going to happen.

Still, I waited. My first problem was that I was not the right person to write this book. There were many others who preceded me at Google and I wanted to give them a crack at writing it first. My second problem was that I as test director for Chrome and Chrome OS (a position now occupied by one of my former directs) had insights into only a slice of the Google testing solution. There was so much more to Google testing that I needed to learn.

At Google, software testing is part of a centralized organization called Engineering Productivity that spans the developer and tester tool chain, release engineering, and testing from the unit level all the way to exploratory testing. There are a great deal of shared tools and test infrastructure for web properties such as search, ads, apps, YouTube, and everything else we do on the Web. Google has solved many of the problems of speed and scale and this enables us, despite being a large company, to release software at the pace of a start-up. As Patrick Copeland pointed out in his preface to this book, much of this magic has its roots in the test team.

At Google, software testing is part of a centralized organization called Engineering Productivity.

When Chrome OS released in December 2010 and leadership was successfully passed to one of my directs, I began getting more heavily involved in other products. That was the beginning of this book, and I tested the waters by writing the first blog post,1 “How Google Tests Software,” and the rest is history. Six months later, the book was done and I wish I had not waited so long to write it. I learned more about testing at Google in the last six months than I did my entire first two years, and Nooglers are now reading this book as part of their orientation.

This isn’t the only book about how a big company tests software. I was at Microsoft when Alan Page, BJ Rollison, and Ken Johnston wrote How We Test Software at Microsoft and lived first-hand many of the things they wrote about in that book. Microsoft was on top of the testing world. It had elevated test to a place of honor among the software engineering elite. Microsoft testers were the most sought after conference speakers. Its first director of test, Roger Sherman, attracted test-minded talent from all over the globe to Redmond, Washington. It was a golden age for software testing.

And the company wrote a big book to document it all.

I didn’t get to Microsoft early enough to participate in that book, but I got a second chance. I arrived at Google when testing was on the ascent. Engineering Productivity was rocketing from a couple of hundred people to the 1,200 it has today. The growing pains Pat spoke of in his preface were in their last throes and the organization was in its fastest growth spurt ever. The Google testing blog was drawing hundreds of thousands of page views every month, and GTAC2 had become a staple conference on the industry testing circuit. Patrick was promoted shortly after my arrival and had a dozen or so directors and engineering managers reporting to him. If you were to grant software testing a renaissance, Google was surely its epicenter.

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Introduction to Google Software Testing