Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
..1
Strategy versus Planning
Before we think about making planning for our project, we must first come up
with some strategy to deal with risks, probable tasks involved, technology selection,
skills matching, required training, automation, tools, automation framework, and
so on. Planning is restricted more or less to making schedules, allocating resources,
selecting tools, deciding on the number of tests to be created and executed, decid-
ing on defect life cycle, and so on. Accordingly, test management should have a
hierarchy of test strategy, test planning, test execution, and analysis and reporting.
..2 Complexity Management
Life was very simple before the old dark days, when the monster mainframe com-
puters had not yet been introduced, sometime just after the Stone Age. No comput-
ers, no modern-day gizmos, no worries about project deadlines, no worries about
facing a dominating boss, no worries about not being able to complete assigned
tasks in time. In short, life was beautiful. But life started becoming less beautiful
once computers started coming round the corner. Life started becoming a little
more complicated. People started worrying about customer expectations, customer
requirements, software design, software architecture, software builds, software ver-
sions, going live, production environments, defect fixes, code reviews, code walk-
throughs, and of course software testing.
With computing power doubling every 2 years over the last 50 years or so, big-
ger and more powerful software applications have been developed and deployed. It
is said that resources at hand are limited, but the human appetite for more has also
fueled the monstrous growth of software systems. At some time human beings were
more than happy with a computing speed of 28 kHz. Now any ordinary computer
comes with 3014 MHz.
More and more of the work is being taken away from human beings and being
assigned to computers. Increases in computing power and in the ability to gather
and enter business data from any geographic site into a central computer database
are helping companies to grow and establish themselves in many geographic regions
of the world and thus become truly global enterprises. And they are expanding
quickly too, thanks to these ubiquitous computers. Without computers, such behe-
moth enterprises are unthinkable.
With such growth in the size of software systems, the complexity of software
systems has also grown.
With the increasing size and complexity of software systems, their testing has
also become more and more complex. You, as a software professional, have to accept
this fact and make improvements in your own skill sets to deal with it. Not only the
size and complexity but also the architecture, programming languages used, and so
on, are also changing with the increasing pace.
