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by Keith Ray.
Original Post: Google Testing Blog
Feed Title: MemoRanda
Feed URL: http://homepage.mac.com/1/homepage404ErrorPage.html
Feed Description: Keith Ray's notes to be remembered on agile software development, project management, oo programming, and other topics.
Check out the Google Testing Blog. I particularly like the logo, which has an unhappy red light-bulb under "Debugging sucks" and a happy green light-bulb above "Testing rocks."
We write flyers about everything from dependency injection to code coverage, and then regularly plaster the bathrooms all over Google with each episode, almost 500 stalls worldwide. We've received a lot of feedback about it. Some favorable ("This is great because I'm always forgetting to bring my copy of Linux Nerd 2000 to the bathroom!") and some not ("I'm trying to use the bathroom, can you folks please just LEAVE ME ALONE?"). Even the Washington Post noticed.
One comment on the Testing on the Toilet entry deserves a response. Joe#302 wrote "My point is that QA needs to have a bright line between it and development. [...] But the two should remain separate. Go to any mature industry's engineering department, and ask how much of the release testing is done or defined by the actual development engineers. [...] This is a sign of the immaturity of the software development industry."
There are many successful projects where the testers and developers are members of the same team. There are also many unsuccessful projects where the testers and developers are not on the same team. The auto industry is pretty mature, and yet the dominant player has this to say in one of their web pages:
The cornerstone of Toyota's quality control system is the role of the team members in the production process. The principles on which Toyota was founded are employed at the Georgetown plant.
Toyota involves its team members by:
encouraging an active role in quality control,
utilizing employee ideas and opinions in production processes,
and practicing "kaizen" ��� striving for constant improvement.
Toyota team members treat the next person on the production line as their customer and will not pass a defective part on to that customer.
The Toilet entry has a number of comments employing certain metaphors. One them is in response to Joe#302. Major Tom wrote:
To respond to Joe #302
You're wrong. I'm a developer in a fortune 500 company and I test everything I do. By the time it goes to Alpha test, only field anomalies break my code. So to say "SDEs are not QAEs, and the distinction should not be blurred, if you want to maintain true quality." you're, well, full of crap. Your statements should be flushed. [...] I have 3000 sites with my software for over three years and have had 2 bugs related to errors on my part. Proper Software Engineering includes heavy testing during development.
I also know of one company that spends Billions (Microsoft) on everything you stated, and well, let their end product speak for itself.
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