Why Didn’t You Test That? guest Gunesh Patil shares insights on his journey beyond the misunderstandings and misconceptions in Model-Based Testing alongside Curiosity Software's Rich Jordan! Rich and Gunesh previously worked together on major SI projects managing transformational change of a disparate systems in a medium-sized organisation. They championed this as Data Automation and Virtual Environments - so, DAVe Ops for their own version release and change management.

DAVe Ops helped spotlight how a shared understanding of a system’s architecture, or lack of, affects good software testing. Circa 2010, Rich illustrates this as an anti-pattern where automation teams were stepping in to help test teams run test cases in bulky end-to-ends. This was in response to automation test cases failing. A fail isn’t due to the automation but more to a lack of shared understanding of the consumable breakpoints in system’s architecture.

For stakeholders with short-term sights on improved automation, this omits the benefits of the ‘how you get there' approach of Model-Based Testing. It’ll deal less with blackbox, instead observes sustainable metrics such as risk, response times, payloads, ie impact analysis. For Gunesh this visual and flow based production of reusable components is actually a driving force in efficiency. The need for a siloed back-and-forth of translating business requirements into test cases gets reduced. An operational win for service isolation and test matching.

Sketching a practical middleware/automation test strategy comes only by listening to the expectations of designers, developers but also seasoned ancillary actors in the CICD pipeline. This ensures constraints and breakpoints are identified, and which anticipates and avoids introducing accidental complexity in a SUT. The outcome is costly and time consuming data overlaps in automation are avoided.

Operationally, test matching, along with getting and allocating data formalises thinking whilst paying down technical debt. The main takeaway is that collective analysis makes software testing more integrated across teams, giving opportunity to create a strategy factoring in isolation breakpoints. So, don’t just do, also pose questions to tackle organisational but also technical inconsistency and intractability.

The Curiosity Software Podcast featuring Huw Price and Rich Jordan! Together, they share their insight and expertise in driving software design and development in test. Learn how you can improve your journey to quality software delivery, by considering how much do you really understand about your systems, and when things inevitably go wrong, why didn’t you test that? Spotify | YouTube | Google Podcasts | Amazon Music | Deezer | RSS Feed