GTAC 2010: Lessons Learned from Testability Failures

Google Test Automation Conference 2010 October 28-29, 2010 "Lessons Learned from Testability Failures" Presented by Esteban Manchado Velázquez, Opera Software ASA. Often, QA staff focus on the testing itself. However, ensuring a good level of testability is crucial for project quality. For the sake of discussion, we can consider a project ""testable"" if its code is easy to unit test, it is easy to deploy multiple times reliably, and it has good introspection capabilities. When the testability level of a project is not monitored, it can end up becoming a burden for the team. These testability problems usually add up in small steps, making them hard to detect if we do not make the effort to look for them. Some examples of testability problems are poor communication about expected behavior, high thresholds for making tests, and low traceability of bugs. These problems make not only testing, but also implementation, harder. It follows that testability is something that teams must devote a considerable amount of time and energy to. First, testability allows a project to grow to several teams. Second, by facilitating testing it enables more and better tests, which results in higher quality. Finally, many developers do not realise its importance and impact, thus it is not something that will typically be addressed unless someone focuses on it. Esteban Manchado Velázquez has been working on software development for around 10 years and is currently Quality Assurance Engineer and Project Manager at Opera Software ASA. He is part of the Opera Link project and has been part of Opera Unite, My Opera and others. He started working as a developer and gradually got involved in more and more QA tasks such as writing tools and improving processes, until he started working on Quality Assurance at Opera Software ASA almost four years ago. His main QA interests are streamlining testing processes and tools, integrating testing in the development process, task automation and (re)defining the role of QA Engineers. Outside computing, he's interested in Jazz, rhythm and drums. Slides for this talk are available at https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0AYfT-BFGDnQkZDVzcmhiNF83NmduY3N4bWRn&sort=name&layout=list&pid=0B4fT-BFGDnQkYzVlMWY4M2EtYjRkYi00MDQ5LTg5ODUtNGQ4ZWU5N2NlMTRl&cindex=5