Test Culture Episode 1-The 101 Unit Testing Guide For Busy Managers

So you want to install a test culture in your team/department ?

Maybe you’ve already done a great deal  by appointing a Test Supervisor that checks every aspect of the finished product. That’s terrific. Congratulations.

But there are still bugs ?  Your team is telling you that this little change you asked took the all system down ? How comes ?

Unit testing rocks

Welcome to this series of article on unit testing and why it rocks.

Most of all : unit testing is greeeaaaat. Not only for the geeks in the dev team but for you too as a manager.

First : have you heard of unit testing ? I mean the real ones, not just the kind when a dev says  ”Yeah, I’ve clicked the button and no exceptions happened , it works guys, let’s go  to prod ! ”

I’m talking about real Automated Unit Testing that implements the specifications and sometimes redefines them in more concrete way (whatever agile of waterfall you are).

As a manager you want to be sure that your team is not building a soft that has absolutely no link with what your client wants. And it all starts with automated unit testing. The foundation on which to build your code, and all the software.

 

Limited budget you fool !

I can hear some of you grumbling behind their desk :

- “Come one you clown, it’s the real world out there, and my budget is shrinking years after years ! I don’t have budget to feed extra testers !”

or

- “Great, my team is going to code twice : one for the tests, the other for the code. Ain’t you mad ?”

or

- “We already got this ! Stop bothering us. But ok :  from time to time, we find bugs as big as the Eiffel Tower. But still, we have unit tests. What more can we do?”

or

- “Unit testing is already part of the procedure. Of course we don’t have time to maintain them. That’s obvious. So we don’t run them any more. But they are here !”

You’ll see that all those worries will disappear when you’ll have a real view of what unit testing is.

The series

I’m not here to sell you some new  methods actually. I’m not even suggesting to test everything. And I swear your team won’t need twice as time as needed.

This series of 12 articles will show you real world examples and arguments why unit testing rocks.

Each episode has recommendations, exercises, success stories and notes for devs too.

Ask questions and debate here if you’r not convinced yet (in French or English, I’ll translate if needed).

Episodes list  :

1.       Introduction

2.       I Need Buzzwords

3.       Can You Unit Test Everything ?

4.       336 Combinations Manualy Tested, 2 Days, 2 People. The Nightmare.

5.       Hudson We Got A Problem

6.       Good Unit Testing Is Better Than Excellent Specifications

7.       Tests Are Broken ? Can We Just Cut Them Out For Latter ?

8.       « If  You Don’t Have Unit Tests, You Are Not Refactoring, You Are Just Moving Shit Around »

9.       Covering All The Code Is Not Enough

10.   The Art Of Unit Testing Is Knowing When To Stop.

11.   The Big Question : How Much ?

12.   Conclusion – Cheat Sheet

 

TODO

·         Subscribe to the RSS feed, or by mail, to receive all the 12 episodes for free directly in your super-web-genious-inbox when they are released.

For the developers out there

Please, feel free to hand this to your manager and to add your own comment. I might be a little too vague sometimes, correct me if needed. The goal is to convince managers to let us code unit tests. The stacks are high. 

By the way :  if you are a dev and you ‘ve never heard of the wonderful advantages of working with JUnit, you should worry NOW !