Back after a long time and wishing you a very happy new year to you all!!
So what does 2013 holds for us in the testing area, I find this year full of lot of prospects and exciting developments for the testing world.
As Agile is changing from the "buzz-word" to "must-have" for most of the clients, I expect to see lot of traction in this area. Historically the Agile has been more of the developers' baby, they seem to have been driving it. However lately the shift can be seen where the distinction between the developers and testers seem to have reduced significantly and we are looking at Agile teams where the team members are "all-rounders" with cross-skills. Earlier it was nice to have teams like that and we aspired for such Agile teams and for lucky ones eventually the teams transformed into this using pairing and extensive training and coaching.
The testers now have been evolving and getting more development-centric, and developers getting hang of testing beyond Unit level. Due to this leveling of the skills, now testers seem to placed in a better position to drive the development activity, some may term it is TDD but what I foresee is a "less intense" TDD. What do I mean by that?
TDD in pure sense would mean that we strictly write the tests first and that gives the scope of development to the developers and they write code that passes the test and stop at that. A less intense TDD would be that you write the test first however it does not take the onus of describing the scope for the developers. So developers would still refer to the SRS (reqt doc) in order to code, the difference being that they will have high priority tests ready for them to conformance to requirements. Subsequently more testing would be done at integration and acceptance level to get the appropriate coverage as required. So if you are not comfortable calling this variation of TDD then we can name is around the concept of early testing (mind you, these are not static tests from V model).
This variation of testing gives ample powers to testers in an Agile (or traditional) methodology and also brings in concept of quality early in the SDLC.
So what does 2013 holds for us in the testing area, I find this year full of lot of prospects and exciting developments for the testing world.
As Agile is changing from the "buzz-word" to "must-have" for most of the clients, I expect to see lot of traction in this area. Historically the Agile has been more of the developers' baby, they seem to have been driving it. However lately the shift can be seen where the distinction between the developers and testers seem to have reduced significantly and we are looking at Agile teams where the team members are "all-rounders" with cross-skills. Earlier it was nice to have teams like that and we aspired for such Agile teams and for lucky ones eventually the teams transformed into this using pairing and extensive training and coaching.
The testers now have been evolving and getting more development-centric, and developers getting hang of testing beyond Unit level. Due to this leveling of the skills, now testers seem to placed in a better position to drive the development activity, some may term it is TDD but what I foresee is a "less intense" TDD. What do I mean by that?
TDD in pure sense would mean that we strictly write the tests first and that gives the scope of development to the developers and they write code that passes the test and stop at that. A less intense TDD would be that you write the test first however it does not take the onus of describing the scope for the developers. So developers would still refer to the SRS (reqt doc) in order to code, the difference being that they will have high priority tests ready for them to conformance to requirements. Subsequently more testing would be done at integration and acceptance level to get the appropriate coverage as required. So if you are not comfortable calling this variation of TDD then we can name is around the concept of early testing (mind you, these are not static tests from V model).
This variation of testing gives ample powers to testers in an Agile (or traditional) methodology and also brings in concept of quality early in the SDLC.
