Smarter Tools, Dumber Developers?

By Linda Hayes

January 29, 2003 12:00 PM ET

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Computerworld - I see a train wreck happening in slow motion. Faster development techniques and technologies are crashing into traditional manual testing approaches. No one seems to understand that just because you can develop faster doesn't mean you can deliver faster. The friction factor is testing.

Look at it this way. If you make any change at all to an application, you run the risk of accidental -- and therefore unanticipated -- breakage. In order to protect operations from potential failure, testing needs to be performed not only for the changes but also all previously existing functionality. So even a 5% development change requires 100% testing.

Do the math. Do you have 20 testers to each developer and 20 times longer to test than develop? I didn't think so.

So you have a choice. Deliver dangerous code fast, or safe code slow? Now, you would think that the obvious answer to this conundrum would be test automation, and you would be right. Only automation can replicate all previous tests while testers add new ones within anything approaching a reasonable time frame. But the glaring reality is that most testing is still done manually because automation is too hard.

And it is probably all your fault. Applications are becoming less and less testable because developers are using less and less discipline. I have seen major, mission-critical Web applications where the pages and objects seem to change names every time you log in -- not that the names were any good to begin with. Button1, text3 and similar names aren't much help, but when they spontaneously become button2 or text2 they are worse than useless -- they are disastrous. When did this swashbuckling approach to programming become OK?

What do we need, training wheels for wayward developers to keep their code stable enough to be tested?

It's like because new tools use wizards, drag-and-drop functionality and other ways of generating code quickly, the code itself is somehow seen as disposable. I've actually had developers argue that it is easier to just throw code away than to fix it. After all, it only took a few hours, days, weeks or whatever to develop, so who cares?


	Linda Hayes is the CTO of WorkSoft Inc., developer of next-generation test automation solutions. She is the founder of three software companies and holds degrees in accounting, tax and law. A frequent industry speaker and award-winning author on software quality, she pioneered automated testing tools. Join the online discussion about this column.

Testers, that's who. Disposable code creates disposable tests.

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