Jeff Gainer's CRITICAL PATH
Software Testing: Ah, Sweet Innocence!
By Jeff Gainer
August 22, 1998
Jeff Gainer discusses the postive impacts of software testing
If anything good ever comes of the Year-2000 boondoggle, it will
likely be a greater degree of attention and respect for software
testing. A number of years ago, after writing my first software
application, I expressed concern to the government agency whose
databases my system accessed that their data tables had only
two-digit year fields. I had managed to work around the problem
for the time being, I noted, but innocently asked, "What are we
supposed to do in sixteen years?" The reply was considerable
amusement that I would worry about something so far in the
future. After all, I was told, the whole software application
would be replaced long before 2000 A.D.
And at last report, the software system has been replaced, indeed,
even updated several times for new platforms, but alas, the
two-digit years remain in the database.
The rise of rapid application development (RAD) and its love
child, Frantic Application Development (FAD) spawned the trend
toward no requirements, at least no written requirements. In
many RAD development shops, testing is viewed as the final step
in the software development life cycle. After a peculiar fashion,
the software is developed, thrown over the wall to an ad hoc test
team consisting of junior developers, clerical workers and a few
business domain experts who happen to have a little free time.
In this environment, everyone plays around with the product, tries
a few actual user scenarios, and otherwise "tests" by generally
poking around for the few weeks allotted to "testing." The results
are predictable: a few enhancements are suggested, a few glaring
bugs are identified, and the product is somberly deemed "tested"
and thus released to the hapless beta testers.
Today however, there is finally a serious trend toward treat
software testing as the legitimate sub-discipline of software
engineering that it rightly is. The industry (and our customers)
have now become acutely aware that the Year-2000 problem is not
confined to aging mainframe "legacy" systems, or buried in arcane
or lost source code and yellowing project documents. Our legacy
systems are aging, undocumented database tables lurking deep
within webs of interdependent systems. Moreover, these
noncompliant data definitions have spawned their own problems,
encouraging time-pressured RAD developers to code around their
non-Year-2000 compliant formats, exacerbating the problem.
If we had only tested these "non-critical" systems for Year-2000
compliance sixteen years ago--but then, such a jejune notion was
considered amusing.
Known in some circles as "Jeff the Evangelist," Jeff Gainer thinks and writes about the state of information technology and process improvement from his office in Colorado, aircraft cabins, and the back seats of Lincoln Town Cars and limousines. Mr. Gainer's latest musings appear in the January edition of Cutter IT Journal, where he discusses the possibilities of "The Coming Backlash: Twilight of the Gods?"
Copyright © 1998, Jeff Gainer, All Rights Reserved.
gainerj@jeffgainer.com
Jeff Gainer's Bio
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