November 07, 2008, 2:37 AM — With the changing trend in the industry, software testing too changes. Today, trends like Web based applications, Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), Software as a Service (SaaS), Wireless Technologies, Mobile technologies, with the increasing emphasis on the 4Rs, repeatability, reliability, re-use and robustness, has opened a new path to testing, where testing will need to change to accommodate these trends and become a business led activity.
In order to drive these changes in effective and efficient application development of quality systems, more emphasis must be placed on improving Analysis and Design phases and ensuring early engagement of testing in these areas.
Robotising the Static Testing built in as part of the Analysis and Design requirements capture tools, will result in, clarity, eradication of assumptions and ambiguity and a greater likelihood of completeness. The product in question will become more reliable, more reusable and more robust.
Automatically generated test scripts with full branch and decision tree coverage at the early test execution stages; unit test and “integration in the smallâ€, combined with the development of fault tolerance into self-testing, self monitoring, self healing software will result in defects being found and eradicated earlier in the lifecycle. As a result, fewer defects would be found at the System Testing and “Integration in the Large†stages and businesses will be able to concentrate on Acceptance Testing (User, Operational and Performance) in a fully integrated target environment and do full end to end testing of business processes and model office scenarios. In this way, businesses will be able to leverage their investment in technology to realise true business benefits and competitive advantage through creative integration and deployment of reliable, re-usable, robust components; the way in which the components are integrated and deployed will be the differentiator, not the components/systems themselves. In turn this will enable business to concentrate on business propositions, and go to market services and products, supported by the ability to deal with high volumes, provide excellent customer service, quickly enable high margin/low volume services etc.
In this new world, the Professional Tester will need to further concentrate on adding value to the business and the software development lifecycle and will hence need to operate in a new and elevated position where the combination of their structured process driven approach, creativity, destructive inquisitiveness and ability to articulate and define quality and testing criteria into the models will be critical to the success of the business implementation of technology.
The role of the Professional Tester will now become more interesting and more essential. And so will Testing and Quality Assurance, which will become more important and add more value as we move into architectures and technologies which support the business in their goals of bringing products and services to the market as rapidly as possible, with minimal risk. We will see a shift towards testing the transformed business operation, the business processes, the way people interact with the systems and processes and the information it provides, and therefore mitigating the risks and increasing the benefits of business change.
