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Software Testing Fundamentals Authors: Hutcheson M. L. Published year: 2005 Pages: 6-7/132 |
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Industry and Technology Trends: Why I Think It's Time to Publish This Book
I began developing these methods in the late 1980s when I worked at Prodigy. They evolved to suit the needs of a fast-paced development environment feeding a large, complex real-time system. They were called the Most Important Tests method, or MITs. MITs quickly became the standard for testing methods at Prodigy, and I began writing and publishing case studies of MITs projects in 1990. I took MITs with me when I left Prodigy in 1993, and it continued to evolve as I tackled more and more testing projects in other industries. I spent most of the last 10 years helping businesses embrace and profit from integrating large systems and the Internet.
The (PowerPoint-based) syllabus that I developed to teach MITs since 1993 is based on the first seven chapters that I wrote for the original book, Software Testing Methods and Metrics . The emphasis then was on client/server testing, not the Internet, and that is reflected in the original chapters.
First offered in 1993, the course has been taught several times each year ever since. I put the original first four chapters on my Web site in 1997. The number of people reading these four chapters has increased steadily over the years. This year some 17,000 visitors have downloaded these chapters. The most popular is Chapter 2, "Fundamental Methods." Because of its popularity and the many e-mail discussions it has sparked, it has been expanded here into Chapter 3: "Approaches to Managing Software Testing," and Chapter 4: "The Most Important Tests (MITs) Method."
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Changing Times
I spent most of 2001 working on Microsoft's .NET developer training materials, and in the process, I became very familiar with most of the facets of .NET. Bottom line is, the new .NET architecture, with its unified libraries, its "all languages are equal" attitude about development languages, and its enablement of copy-and-run applications and Web services brings us back to the way we did things in the early 1990s-those heady days I spent at Prodigy. The big and exciting difference is that Prodigy was small and proprietary; .NET will be global and public (as well as private).
It will be two years before we really begin to see the global effects of this latest shortening of the software development cycle. Literally, anyone can deploy and sell software as a Web service on global scale, without ever burning a CD, or writing a manual, or paying for an ad in a magazine. And at some point, that software will be tested .
The picture becomes even more interesting when you consider that we are now just beginning the next wave of Internet evolution; the mobile Internet. Just as the PC revolutionized the way we do business today, the smart phones and pocket PCs will allow more people than ever before to access dynamic applications on small screens, with tenuous data links. The methods in this book evolved in just such an environment, and were successful.
Software testing must show that it adds value, and that it is necessary for product success. Otherwise, market forces will encourage competitive shops to forego testing and give the product to the users as fast as they can write it and copy it to the server.
This book is about fundamentals, and fortunately, "fundamental" concepts, while sometimes out of style, evolve very slowly. The examples in the original Prodigy work were out of style in the client/server days; they are very much back in style in the .NET world. In many ways, revising this work to be current today is actually taking it back to its original state.
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Software Testing Fundamentals Authors: Hutcheson M. L. Published year: 2005 Pages: 6-7/132 |
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