Skip to main content

Software Testing Life Cycle? Bleurgh!

I was recently updating my LinkedIn (Add me here if you like) and I was looking through the skills, something that I find as a bit of a pointless feature, well, the endorsing of skills is a bit pointless, as I have people who I've never worked with endorsing me for skills that they really don't know I have, it's nice that they feel they can endorse me but it happens so often, that it kind of makes endorsements pointless? Anyway, I digress...

There was a skill in there for the Software Testing Lifecycle, and I thought about it, and what it meant. It's saying that you can have a skill in just the software testing lifecycle, but in my opinion, we should be moving away from this, we shouldn't be focusing on just the testing phases, we as QA should be involved from the offset, and hence, we shouldn't just be having a Software Testing Lifecycle as a skill, we should be aiming for having the Software Development Lifecycle, as we are all (Devs and QAs) involved in the development and testing of a software product.

Maybe I'm being too cynical, but I really think that little things like this, don't help in a quest/vision to be seen as one.
Labels:

Comments

  1. Phil16 July 2013 at 10:35

    It's all bollocks really, I see it on job ads all the time "familiar with SDLC", totally meaningless so I dont think aiming for that is useful. What exactly does it mean??
    Yes I am skilled in the SLDC. Which one? the one in a textbook? the one at Acme Inc? The one at Google? The one at MS?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Gareth Waterhouse16 July 2013 at 11:51

      It's more about being aware of the different types of development lifecycles, and the pros and cons of each I guess. I really disliked the Testing Lifecycle as I disagree that testing is a seperate process in the dev lifecycle. I see your point tho, there's such a variety of different SDLC that it in itself shouldn't really be part of a job desc or a skill as such.

      Delete
  2. Unknown22 July 2013 at 05:29

    I agree with this comment completely. You need to understand both concepts and not restrict youself to one..... if a tester understands the development life cyle then they will know when is best to engage the software test life cyle.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Jagran Today21 October 2013 at 03:43

    Software Development life cycle is the process which is followed to develop a software product. It is a structured way of building software applications. Most organizations have a process in place for developing software; this process may, at times, be customized based on the organizations requirement and framework followed by organization.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Coding something simple.... or not! Taking a screenshot on error using Selenium WebDriver

I recently wrote a little function that takes a screenshot at the end of a test if it has errored. What sounded very simple at the start turned out to be quite a bit of work, and quite a few lines of code to handle certain scenarios! It's now over 50 lines of code! I'll start with what I had at the beginning, this was to simply take a screenshot in the working directory, we are using SpecFlow and Selenium to run the tests, so we are going to check if the ScenarioContext.Current.TestError isn't null, if it is, then using Selenium, take a screenshot (note the below code is a simplified version of what I had at the beginning). [AfterScenario]         public static void TakeScreenShotOnError()         {             if (ScenarioContext.Current.TestError == null) return;             var screenshotDriver = Driver as ITakesScreenshot;             if (screenshotD...
15 comments
Read more

How to manage resources within new teams?

Working where I work we are constantly spinning up new teams to take on new workloads as business come up with new demands and new features they want developed and tested. The problem with this is how do we ensure the work of the newly spun up team is of sufficient quality. One method is by taking people from other established teams and placing them on the new team. This works great for the new team, but unfortunately it will oftenl eave the established team lacking in a resource whilst they try and fill the gap left by the person who has left. We are seeing this often with our offshore teams, it can be damaging to the team structure and the teams velocity, but try as I might, I can't think of another way around it. It's far easier to take 1 person from a team that is established than it is to build a whole new team from scratch. At least by leaving the core of a team in place, you should be guaranteeing that the new team are aware of any coding standards or any QA standard...
Post a Comment
Read more

Considerations when creating automated tests

We recently released to a number of teams our automated regression pack that has been worked on over the past few months. This regression pack tests legacy code, but contains a large number of tests.  As a bit of background, a number of teams are working on new solutions whilst some are still working on legacy code. With this in mind we constructed an email with a list of guidelines when creating new tests that need to be added to this regression pack.  I figured that these can be quite broad so should apply for any organisation, so thought it would make an interesting blog post...  So here goes,  when creating automated tests, it's important to consider and adhere to the following: - Think about data . The tests need to retrieve or set the data they need without any manual intervention - This should help them be more robust and easier to run without manual intervention. - The tests need to be idempotent - By making it so that each test is standalone and does...
Post a Comment
Read more