Dr. Dobb's Journal - February 2008 - (Page 73)

d02ambler_p4ma 12/7/07 2:06 PM Page 73 parallel to the development team. Your testing environment should simulate your production environment as much as possible. Figure 2 overviews this strategy, showing how the development team deploys the current working build into your testing environment. This should occur at least once an iteration because you want to reduce the feedback lifecycle as much as possible. The independent testers don’t need a lot of details; their goal is to break the system in ways that the development team hasn’t thought about—the implication is that they don’t need a detailed requirements specification from you. The only documentation that they might need is a list of changes since the last deployment so that they know what to focus on first, because most likely new defects would have been introduced in the implementation of the changes. The investigative testers will use complex, and often expensive, tools to do their jobs and will usually be very highly skilled people. When the investigative testers find a potential problem, it might be what they believe is missing functionality or it might be something that doesn’t appear to work properly, which they write up as a “change story.” Change stories are basically the agile form of a defect report or enhancement request, and many teams will often use defect-tracking tools such as ClearQuest or Bugzilla to manage them. The development team treats change stories like requirements—they estimate the effort to address the requirement and ask their project stakeholder(s) to prioritize it accordingly. Then, when the change story makes it to the top of their prioritized work-item list, they address it at that point in time. In effect, any potential defect found via investigative testing becomes a known issue that is then speci- fied and validated via TDD. Because TDD is performed in an automated manner to support regression testing, the implication is that the investigative testers do not need to be as concerned about automating their own efforts, but instead can focus on the high-value activity of defect detection. enable you to achieve these same goals at a higher level, so you need to adopt other, complementary techniques. The principles of Agile Modeling can be applied to address the high-level specification issues that TDD does not, and an independent test team working with your development team can address the testing concerns that TDD does not. DDJ Scott is a DDJ Senior Contributing Editor and author of numerous IT books. He can be contacted at www.ambysoft.com/ scottAmbler.html. TDD at Scale Test-driven development (TDD) is an important agile development technique that enables you to specify and validate functionality at a finely detailed level. But it does not HD PHOTO N O W A V A I LA B LE F O R D O W N L O A D I S 4 0 - 6 0 % F A ST E R I N P I C TO O LS . Speed-optimized HD Photo libraries are now available within the PICTools Software Development Kit (SDK). Microsoft’s HD Photo offers higher image quality, greater preservation of data and advanced features for today’s digital imaging applications. It is a still image compression algorithm for continuous tone photographic images and features lossy, as well as lossless, compression, multiple colorspaces, a wide dynamic range, and extensive metadata support. PICTools SDKs contain low-level C libraries offering advanced image compression, decompression, and editing. Maximum code speed has been achieved through algorithm and machine code optimizations. Also available for .NET and ActiveX. Supported across: 32-bit Sun Solaris 32-bit and 64-bit Linux 32-bit and 64-bit Microsoft Windows IBM AIX Mac OS X Contact us for more information. W W W . P E G A S U S I M A G I N G . C O M Figure 2: Continuous investigative testing. Pegasus is a registered trademark of Pegasus Imaging Corporation in the United States. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners. February 2008 l www.ddj.com l Dr. Dobb’s Journal 73 http://www.ambysoft.com/scottambler.html http://www.ambysoft.com/scottambler.html http://www.pegasusimaging.com http://www.pegasusimaging.com http://www.ddj.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Dr. Dobb's Journal - February 2008

Dr. Dobb's Journal - February 2008 Contents Hmmmm Alia Vox Developer Diaries Developer’s Notebook South American Software Development Conversations Inside Visual Studio 2008 BibPort: Creating Bibliographic References Continuous LINQ The ZK Framework Static Testing C++ Code The Agile Edge Effective Concurrency Swaine’s Flames

Dr. Dobb's Journal - February 2008

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