A little while ago I wrote a blog called ‘What are the entry criteria for Load Testing?’.
For this blog, I’d like to focus on what to do if the entrance criterion of “Non-functional requirements (NFRs) are defined and signed off” has not been met. Also, what can be done if they have been defined but are simply not good enough to properly test in a meaningful way?
Topics: Software Testing, Performance Testing Entry and Exit Criteria
Even with the best will in the world, we all forget to do something at some point in time. Whether that be something trivial like putting out the bins to forgetting to pick up the kids after school…Yep, that has happened…
Having a checklist (or to-do list) saves you from missing something out. A checklist, simply put, is a standardised list of activities for a repetitive task. It helps to ensure consistency and completeness in carrying out a task or series of tasks.
For all those budding chefs out there, the question will always be, do you follow a recipe for your meal or do you make it up as you go along? Now, creative and seasoned chefs will throw in the ingredients to produce delightful food, however for us less talented would-be-cooks, our results will be vastly different, and that’s the point. To get predicable results you’ll need to follow a process (recipe) to gain the greatest chance of success - just like adopting an automation test framework.
Lack of Appetite to Test
The most debilitating and possibly biggest challenge I face when it comes to load testing is the lack of appetite to load and performance test from the senior project stakeholders.
Before you can begin to improve software testing in your organisation, you need to refresh yourself as to why testing is so important. It’s very easy to take things for granted; take your car for example, you get in, start it up and drive. You never think it’s not going to start or breakdown. There was a time though when cars were poorly made, forever breaking down and a real source of disappointment. Now, cars are largely fault free thanks to advanced engineering and software design and of course very thorough testing. There are millions of lines of code in each modern vehicle, and each line of code has been tested many, many times under many conditions to ensure a fault free drive. Some cars, as I write this article are achieving Level 3 Car autonomy - drivers are still necessary in level 3 cars, but are able to completely shift "safety-critical functions" to the vehicle, under certain traffic or environmental conditions.
Topics: Software Testing, improve software testing
As you might have realised the modern world is moving and developing at an alarming pace, change within our daily life is rapid, and just about everything we do in some way has been enabled by a computer and each application has been developed and (hopefully) tested. The desire to do more and do it quickly for less is forever in demand. Change is here to stay and organisations need to be ready to cope with the ever-increasing mandate for speed of delivery and first-class quality.
Topics: Software Testing, TEST AUTOMATION BENEFITS
It’s fair to say we’ve all been in a situation where we’ve encountered a regression issue; whether that be taking your Christmas lights out the box having not used them for a year, only to discover a tangle of wires, you unpick one tangle and that leads to another one forming, or when you tick the box for paperless bills from your well-known utility company only to still receive paper bills…. some two years later.
When testing, there are specific project phases, these are all very well-known and well documented. However, software testing is not a single activity per se, but a concatenation of planned activities that need to be executed, along with the software development activities to ensure that a product is delivered to cost and time, without any errors. The following article aims to explain how testing fits within the life cycle of a project and the benefits of early testing and shifting left the quality as early as possible in the software testing life cycle. The following provides a high-level overview as how to plan your testing activities.
A question I get asked a lot is ‘What are the entry criteria for load testing?’ Before I go on, I’d like to clarify what I mean by load testing. Sometimes I see the term confused with; interchanged with or lumped in with performance testing orperformance testing tool. When I refer to types of performance testing, I mean end to end response time, including rendering, of a single user. By load testing and stress testing I mean, how does the system including network, servers, machines and database cope when multiple users are using it at the same time?
Topics: Software Testing, load testing, Load and Performance Testing
Adoption of new working practices and methodologies has meant that organisations are constantly challenging themselves to get products and services to market faster than ever and in doing so are now having to think very hard how this can be achieved. We all know that first to market gets the spoils, so there is a lot at stake getting the delivery model right. Test Automation is just one way of speeding up your project delivery and in doing so building up a regression pack of test scripts that can be run with little effort in a short amount of time.
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