Comments on: Stop ISO 29119

By: Michael

Michael — Sun, 31 Aug 2014 15:34:55 +0000

John, my last major project simply could not have been delivered without a comprehensive test suite. With only three people left in the company who understand the business rules and only one and a half of them available to the project all we could do was capture as many test scenarios as we could.

Since then there has been zero resources available for UAT so urgent changes have had to go live with minimal testing. These changes are ablating the value of those scripts, and as you observed maintaining those scripts is not seen as valuable.

Eventually the whole edifice will collapse. The business risk being taken, and I hope this is understood, is will the system decommissioning date arrive before that point.

By: Tim Hall

Tim Hall — Sun, 31 Aug 2014 09:42:50 +0000

Automated testing has a role, to replace the tedious, repetitive bits. It’s never going to replace manual testing, and any management who think it can have fallen for snake-oil merchants.

By: John P.

John P. — Sat, 30 Aug 2014 23:24:04 +0000

Project damagers – love ‘em or loathe ‘em, you just can’t avoid ‘em.

Automated testing is a lovely idea in theory but it crashes into the buffers of reality. If scripts are to be any use, they have to be very comprehensive. It takes time to build them and more time to maintain them – either because of changes or because you’ve found some scenario that the original build didn’t test. In general, the customer isn’t willing to pay for the supplier to do this work and the supplier isn’t willing to do it FOC. So you just end up with a script that is pointlessly simplistic and which gives a false sense of security or you find that it is quicker and more versatile to get somebody to do the job manually.

By: Michael

Michael — Thu, 28 Aug 2014 21:54:56 +0000

I’m not yet sufficiently informed about this standard to pronounce upon it, but in my workplace there are still two different streams of thought.

The first group, mainly in the development community, assert that automated testing has to be mandatory.

The second group, mainly in the support community, see the test scripts as nothing more than extra support overhead and ignore them. Once the test script no longer tests the code, it isn’t worth running and it is never worth bringing one back up to scratch.

I’m in favour of test scripts provided they do something useful. A test script which is there simply to satisfy an automated system rule which states “you cannot submit code to go live without a matching test script” is in danger of abuse.

By: Tim Hall

Tim Hall — Thu, 28 Aug 2014 17:27:29 +0000

Have you ever read “Parkinson’s Law” by C. Northcote Parkinson? Written way back in the 1930s, but still relevant today, it describes that sort of workplace perfectly.

By: Synthetase

Synthetase — Thu, 28 Aug 2014 15:21:07 +0000

“Those types who think the deliverables for testing arenâ€™t software that works, but reams of documentation all in the correct format using corporate-approved templates, which can be filed way where nobody will ever actually read them.”

Wow that perfectly describes my girlfriend’s workplace’s ‘project management office’. Notice they aren’t called the ‘project delivery office’. They aren’t interested in delivering projects, just spinning the wheels and filling out forms.

By: Tim Hall

Tim Hall — Wed, 27 Aug 2014 21:58:28 +0000

The trouble with this is I can imagine precisely the sort of test manager who will be enthusiasic about ISO 29119. Those types who think the deliverables for testing aren’t software that works, but reams of documentation all in the correct format using corporate-approved templates, which can be filed way where nobody will ever actually read them.

Sadly I’ve worked for people who think like that.

By: John P.

John P. — Wed, 27 Aug 2014 21:47:05 +0000

It sounds like the BS5750/ISO9000 stuff from the early 2000′s. I can see that it is probably well intentioned but it won’t happen that way. Companies will simply do the absolute minimum to comply without doing anything meaningful or useful or entering into the spirit of the thing. So it will be a case of just documenting something general like “test it works as specified and retest if anything changes” without saying anything specific about what that involves and then hang the certificate on the wall.

A pointless waste of time but you only have to do it until everyone has forgotten about it. I mean, BS5750 was a buzzword back then but when was the last time you saw anybody bragging about having it these days? It’s a fad that will be forgotten.

By: Five Blogs â€“ 24 August 2014 | 5blogs

Five Blogs â€“ 24 August 2014 | 5blogs — Sat, 23 Aug 2014 22:21:41 +0000

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By: James Christie

James Christie — Thu, 21 Aug 2014 21:31:25 +0000

Thanks for the support Tim.