How has software testing change in recent times?

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Permalink Reply by Anne-Marie Charrett on October 17, 2007 at 8:09am

Nice topic Rosie!

I think one of the major changes has been the introduction of the internet and web testing. Its forced traditional testers to rethink how testing may be performed as deadlines seem to be tighter and money less.

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Permalink Reply by Bill Matthews on October 17, 2007 at 10:16am

I think the way that testing is perceived has changed significantly over the last 15 years but thinking back to my early roles (94/95), most aspects of testing haven't changed that much. While there have been significant technological changes, and systems are generally larger and more complex that they used to be, many of the types of tools and techniques that I used back then are still common-place today.

Compared to the changes experienced in the software development industry I don’t think testing has gone through that much of a change. Particularly in the area of tool support, where I think testers are inadequately equipped to readily meet the demands of modern systems. Although in the last few years there have been some interesting developments on this front.

Personally, I think the biggest positive change I've seen (at least in UK) is that software testing is now seen as profession rather than something you give to the users or junior programmers to do.

Linked to this positive change I've seen a big growth in the resources available for people to learn more about testing, when I started there was very little in the way of formal training and books....and what I learnt about testing at Uni could fit on the back of a post card....might have a chat with my local Uni to see how things have changed.

On a more negative note and possibly linked to the growing professionalism, is the reliance on certification to judge how good a tester is. In the UK, the ISEB Foundation is considered a minimum for testing roles but in my opinion does not show that the holder can actually test effectively or efficiently. While the certification is very popular I personally feel that the bar has been set too low.

I feel that the next 5-10 years will see significant change in the way that we approach testing.

Anyway, that’s my tuppence-worth

Regards
Bill

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Permalink Reply by Bill Matthews on October 17, 2007 at 11:56am

33 years ago!!! Wow, have you been involved in testing IT systems all that time?

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Permalink Reply by phil kirkham on October 17, 2007 at 9:25pm

From my old companies perspective I would say nothing has changed - when I left I found a 12 year old project post mortem document which had as one of it's main issues the lack of testing. 12 years later and management were still getting angry at the programmers for producing buggy code that went wrong when shipped to the customer

Good points are the number of testing blogs and forums out there ( though is it just the same people reading them rather than the managers that need to be ? )
Bad point is that there's still the idea that anyone can do testing - just bash the keyboard and see if the app crashes. If not, ship it

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Permalink Reply by Frederic Torres on October 19, 2007 at 2:24am

I just wanted to add a comment about web functional testing tools and their prices.

5 years there were NO good web testing for less than $1000, not to mention that their programming languages, IDE and debugger were proprietary.

Today you have free/open source tools and tools for less than $1000 with standard languages and environments.

- Free/open source: Watir (Ruby language) and Selenium (Java, Ruby, Python, C#). Probably Eclipse would be the
environment.

- TestComplete (JavaScript, VBScript, DelphiScript, IDE=proprietary) Around $700 I think.

- InCisif.net : C#, VB.NET and Iron Python, integrated with Visual Studio 2005, 2008 and free express editions.
Amazing record mode, but I am bias because I wrote it. Around $400-$499 a license. Free license for personal
use. www.InCisif.net.

Actually the world of Functional Web Testing tools is getting bigger.

So it's up to you evaluate these tools.

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