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.



Software Testing Fundamentals
Software Testing Fundamentals: Methods and Metrics
ISBN: 047143020X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 132

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