Real-World Testing Questions
Posted: Mon Sep 01, 2008 10:17 pm
Greetings Guys,
I wanted to see if I can lean on a bit of the expertise here to help me solve a testing related problem I seem to be facing. Most of my employers have been small businesses that build web software. The dev teams are generally very small (2-3 guys), and the companies don't have the revenue to support a QA department. As a result, the developers are normally left to figure an approach approach to testing the product.
Existing testing practices follow a very loose set of test cases (steps to test a single feature). There's a few unit tests here and there, but as far as code coverage goes it doesn't exist. The product as it stands is probably somewhere around 35,000 lines of code. As the size of the product continues to increase, as you can imagine it becomes more difficult to test.
The app is written in PHP5. The project doesn't use any sort of MVC setup, so the page level logic is normally contained in an appropriate .php file. So for example, we might have a page that asks for an email address. The validation code for checking that email address (among other things) would reside at the top of that page. There's classes, but they don't really handle business logic and more serve as a method of getting stuff into and out from the database. The code for the mostpart is fairly clean & readable. That said, it's already to the point where the amount of testing time required to adequately make one testing pass has become too excessive.
Have any of you guys faced a similar situation? Any thoughts for solutions? My gut feeling is that time needs to be invested in getting code coverage in the form of unit tests. Given the limited financial resources, and the existing state of the product, I'm sort of at a loss. Any thoughts/suggestions welcome.
Thanks guys.
I wanted to see if I can lean on a bit of the expertise here to help me solve a testing related problem I seem to be facing. Most of my employers have been small businesses that build web software. The dev teams are generally very small (2-3 guys), and the companies don't have the revenue to support a QA department. As a result, the developers are normally left to figure an approach approach to testing the product.
Existing testing practices follow a very loose set of test cases (steps to test a single feature). There's a few unit tests here and there, but as far as code coverage goes it doesn't exist. The product as it stands is probably somewhere around 35,000 lines of code. As the size of the product continues to increase, as you can imagine it becomes more difficult to test.
The app is written in PHP5. The project doesn't use any sort of MVC setup, so the page level logic is normally contained in an appropriate .php file. So for example, we might have a page that asks for an email address. The validation code for checking that email address (among other things) would reside at the top of that page. There's classes, but they don't really handle business logic and more serve as a method of getting stuff into and out from the database. The code for the mostpart is fairly clean & readable. That said, it's already to the point where the amount of testing time required to adequately make one testing pass has become too excessive.
Have any of you guys faced a similar situation? Any thoughts for solutions? My gut feeling is that time needs to be invested in getting code coverage in the form of unit tests. Given the limited financial resources, and the existing state of the product, I'm sort of at a loss. Any thoughts/suggestions welcome.
Thanks guys.