BT

Facilitating the Spread of Knowledge and Innovation in Professional Software Development

Write for InfoQ

Topics

Choose your language

InfoQ Homepage News Tackle Testing Debt Incrementally

Tackle Testing Debt Incrementally

Bookmarks
Johanna Rothman is a management consultant and author of several books used by Agile managers, including Techies & Nerds: The Secrets and Science of Hiring Technical People, and Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management (with Esther Derby).  Recently, on StickyMinds, Rothman wrote on the subject of technical debt:
"Technical debt is the unfinished work the product development team accumulated from previous iterations or releases. This debt includes: design debt, where the design is insufficiently robust in some areas; development debt, where pieces of the code are missing; and testing debt, where tests were not developed or run against the code."
In her Sticky Minds article, Rothman proposed an incremental approach to help teams reduce the amount of testing debt on their projects.  She outlined the following practices, and her article then goes on to discuss each one:
  1. Decompose each area into several use cases or scenarios, or use your own technique to break the big area into smaller pieces.
  2. Rank these more granular areas according to risk.
  3. Develop tests in timeboxes, starting with the highest risk areas, until this release is complete.
The time of testing staff is often at a premium - this prioritized approach will allow a team to make the best use of this scarce resource.

Rate this Article

Adoption
Style

Hello stranger!

You need to Register an InfoQ account or or login to post comments. But there's so much more behind being registered.

Get the most out of the InfoQ experience.

Allowed html: a,b,br,blockquote,i,li,pre,u,ul,p

Community comments

Allowed html: a,b,br,blockquote,i,li,pre,u,ul,p

Allowed html: a,b,br,blockquote,i,li,pre,u,ul,p

BT