Software Testing Blog Series – The Beginning
FuBK-Testbild by Rotkaeppchen68 / CC BY-SA 3.0
Today we are more than excited to announce our own blog series about Software Testing. In the blog series we discuss unit testing, regression testing, test driven development and many more relevant methodologies. In this first blog we introduce the blog series by explaining why we wrote it and who we wrote it for. Furthermore, we also explain the practicalities such as our release cycle and how to reach out to us in case you want to give us feedback 🙂
Why write a blog series about Software Testing?
We at Omoroi think that automated software testing plays a crucial part in today’s software development. The pace at which software is being developed nowadays is very fast – or, at least, that is the expectation. Not only is the pace fast, but also the complexity keeps growing. Furthermore, software development communities can be big and developers are expected to jump from one area to another with as little slowdown as possible.
The combination of progressing fast, managing an ever-growing complexity and being ready to jump into a new area in quick succession seems like an overwhelming task for any developer or team. The solution many successful software development communities rely on is automated software testing. With proper software testing in place, the individual developer can move faster without risk of breaking something unexpected. Likewise, the community at large can recruit new people and switch existing developers around without substantial risk or slowdown.
While automated software testing can be a godsend, it can be difficult to achieve and maintain proper testing. Writing tests take up time, but nevertheless, it is important to know what kind of tests are relevant for your product and your community. One can have extensive test coverage, yet the tests don’t provide much value. Also the converse is true, one can have just a few tests and they provide tremendous value.
What will we cover?
This blog series aims to help individual developers understand better what kind of value each test methodology or test type provides, respectively. Furthermore, this blog series can be used as a collection of reference documentation when you need to look up something. We also hope that management can use this blog series to gain a better understanding of why developers want to push for more testing.
The blog series is written in a style that every methodology we describe is useful. While we firmly believe this is true, reading discretion is advised. Every product is somewhat unique and every community is unique. What is absolutely a must for a community with a headcount of one-hundred might not be as useful if you are only two persons working on a product. Likewise, if you’re working on a computer game that is outdated within a year, regression testing is not as useful as if you’re working on a product that is intended to live for decades to come.
To reiterate the last paragraph, we describe a whole lot of different methodologies that are useful in general. However, we do not expect every community to adopt all of them. Each community needs to decide for themselves what is useful, realistic and achievable in their particular scenario.
Agenda and schedule
At this point we hope we have managed to raise your curiosity while giving a realistic idea of what the blog series is like. We are going to release new blog posts every other week. The tentative plan for topics is as follows:
Introduction (this post)
Feedback
As said, the plan is tentative. We want to be open and accepting of feedback from our readers. We at Omoroi value positive feedback, and we value criticism even more. If you think we got something wrong, we hope you send us feedback so we can learn and correct it.
You can reach us at blog@omoroi.fi or discuss in this LinkedIn thread
Summary
In this blog post we introduced our brand new blog series about Software Testing. We explained why software development can be so hard today and why automated software testing can make development far easier. Furthermore, we explained who the blog series is for. Lastly, we presented the practicalities around the release of the blog series.
