Professional developers test their application but not only with some unit tests and a few acceptance tests. These are components of a testing strategy.

Your company might have a Quality Assurance (QA) department or quality analysts (QAs) in each development team to track bugs before a release. As programmer our role is to let them find nothing, otherwise it means that in a way we failed somewhere during the development phase. Of course this goal is almost impossible to achieve every time but that is not an excuse for letting bugs slip through the code.

Am I saying that the developers and the QAs relationship is adversarial ? Absolutely not, they are parts of the same team. First, QAs are “specifiers”. It means that they are able to translate business requirements into test cases to let the programmers know how the system should behave (more in chapter “Acceptance Testing“). Secondly QAs are “characterizers”. They have the discipline to track incorrect behavior and to reproduce them in order to give proper feedback to development team and to the business.

Having a full test automation policy is a feature of professional development teams which is not only composed by unit tests and acceptance tests. The test automation pyramid figure show every test types and their proportion.

Unit tests are written by the programmers for the programmers to ensure that the code is working at the deepest/lowest level. They should execute in milliseconds and target a 100% code coverage (at least 90%).

Component tests are a part of the acceptance tests and check the behavior of individual component. A component encapsulate a specific set of business rules. These kind of tests should be very quick as well because they are decoupled from the other components and should cover about half the system.

Integration tests are required to check the communication between components in order to verify that the “plumbing” has been done correctly. They ensure that the architectural structure of the system is correct. About 20% of the system is covered by integration tests.

System tests are executed at the highest level of the system, from the UI to check the whole application and its construction (load tests are in this category for instance). They check about 10% of the system.

Manual/exploratory tests are done by humans to explore the application for unexpected behaviors. They need the human creativity to hunt possible hidden bugs.

An effective testing strategy is required to develop reliable applications. This comes from the relationship between QAs and programmers and from a solid automated test suite.

See you next time for “Time Management“ !