When I hear the word testing, I become stressed. What a headache, I think. Pictures flash through my head of teams burning the midnight oil trying to get a product out. Ed Yourdon’s book Death March1 comes to mind along with visions of sleepless nights and troublesome days. Thoughts about budget and schedule problems clutter my head along with the seemingly everpresent performance problems that always seem to arise near the end of the project. I ponder, “how did we get in so much trouble?” and contemplate “have things gotten any better?”
When you give these questions some thought, you realize that we have made great strides in the realm of testing over the past decade, including shifts to incremental development and delivery that address persistent integration problems. Test management processes have matured and people seem to be paying attention to test issues earlier in their programs. Test methods and tools that we talked about just a decade ago are currently being used and working. Most important, we no longer seem to be beating our heads against the wall as we try to cope with the issues and challenges that seem to pop up the moment we start integrating and testing our products.
