This Has Been a Test

For nearly the entire history of application development—certainly since application development became available to a larger market with the adoption of the personal computer for expansive business use—testing has taken a back seat across most of the industry. This is not because we don’t care about code quality but because it takes resources away from developing cool new tools—or even products—and slows down release cycles. Historically, both of these issues have been huge. Manual testing staff grows quickly from a few people to a massive department and waiting for that process to complete could take forever.

So, we’ve not done a lot of it. Oh, when executives or someone in leadership demanded more thorough testing, IT management would promise to do so and then—to fit within budget and time constraints—would tell developers to test their own code. There are several areas where you don’t ask the person responsible for creating the final product to review that final product—because if they knew they were doing something wrong, they’d fix it. Writing is one such area—that’s why good editors are worth their weight in gold, even in the age of the internet where anyone can (and too many do) spew onto the digital page whatever they like without the benefit of an editor. Another is testing application code. I test as I write my code, and like every person who has spent time as a professional developer, I have made a couple of stupendous errors. If I’d known that the particular weakness I left in the system was there, I would not have said it was done.

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When DevOps came along, I expected things to change—until I understood that DevOps (and Agile, in lockstep) was all about delivering faster, not better. Anything that slowed down the process—testing, security, even compliance, to an extent, that cannot be avoided—was frowned upon. When test-driven development (TDD) came along, I instantly developed a love/hate relationship with it. We used it for a project I was on and, frankly, it shifted quality concerns to the tests—the code could be forced to pass all of the tests, but how thorough and accurate the tests themselves were—particularly as the project grew and changed—became the question. Done right, TDD would solve a lot of our testing problems. Heck, even done wrong it would have taken care of most problems that simple unit testing could cover.

But after decades, I think we are finally at the point where we can demand and require thorough testing with acceptable and growing coverage numbers. And you need to consider it. Test automation has come a long way and far too many of you haven’t come along with it. If you struggle to justify investing in test suites, I get it. I’ve been the manager that had to choose between improving DB performance and testing. But the modern iteration includes security testing. So if, out-of-the-box, you could get a tool that checked for valid inputs and alerted to places where invalid data might break the application, that might help. And that’s just the simplest case. I’m currently working in an adjacent space, so I don’t want to get too crazy selling you here. I’ll just say, “Testing isn’t what it was even a couple of years ago. Check it out.” Both application and security testing. And the changes will continue to come as claims of using AI/ML turn into applying actual algorithms that your AI or data science people can compare to help choose a high-quality product.

We could debate all day whether DevOps made apps more or less stable and secure, but we don’t need to. Finally, continuous testing is real. Check out the vendors doing this, compare them and see how easy it is to fit them into your environment. More stable, more secure, not the hold-up you have stuck in your head. What’s not to like? You are already rocking it; automated testing could make you look even better.