Chapter 13: Testing, Testing, Testing


Overview

Before I get into the meat of this chapter, I want to point out something: The second word in the title test engineer is engineer. Why am I mentioning this? Because a lot of programmers tend to forget this point. I’m not lying. Some people actually pursue the field of test engineering, or as some of them call it, quality assurance (QA). (That’s what I’m going to call them in this chapter: QA engineers, or just QA people. And occasionally I’ll say tester.) And such people are not simply “hoping to move up into programming.”

True, some companies start younger, entry-level people out in the QA department, and such people eventually get promoted into actual programming. But if this is the way you do business, then you are making a big mistake. I explain why in this chapter.

But the primary focus of this chapter is usability. Yeah, yeah, I’ve been tooting that horn since I came into your previously perfect world. But testing really does have a role in usability. And that’s the focus of this chapter.

Note

The more common use of the term software testing refers to the process of finding bugs in code that cause the code to break. This is a laborious task with very few good tools on the market. For that type of testing, you might want to take a look at the new book, Software Test Automation: Developing an Automated Software Testing Tool by Kanglin Li and Mengqi Wu (Sybex, 2004), which teaches testing procedures and takes the reader through the steps to develop an automated testing tool. All of the code for the tool is provided with the book.




Designing Highly Useable Software
Designing Highly Useable Software
ISBN: 0782143016
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 114

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