Hey Brian,
Things seem to be trending up at WMF, especially w/ the Web engineers' big
strides in end-to-end testing. However, as the
article suggests, you need
to attack the quality problem from both ends—perhaps even emphasizing unit
tests (shortest feedback, cheapest, least fragile).
Completely agree. Just wanted to point out that we're not focusing solely
on browser tests, but trying to make them more stable and useful for our
daily usage. That's why you may be seeing "browser testing" conversations
and noise around, because right now they are far from being useful and
stable for what they are and what we do.
You'll see more convos regarding exposing unit coverage and stricter
testing among developers in the following months.
---
It was an interesting article, keeping in mind that there are no universal
laws, and it all depends on tradeoffs. Articles like this could certainly
help management people understand the importance of the different types of
testing.
Thanks for sharing.
On Fri, Jun 19, 2015 at 3:55 PM, Brian Gerstle <bgerstle(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
> Short "case study" at LinkedIn [0]
> <
>
http://engineering.linkedin.com/developer-happiness/getting-code-production…
> >
> about how they cut release latencies by 80-90% by reversing the "ice cream
> cone of death" [1]
> <http://engineering.linkedin.com/sites/default/files/InitialState-Fun.png
> >:
>
> There's one particular snippet that strongly resonates with what I've
> experienced at multiple jobs (emphasis mine):
>
> *Team ownership of quality*
>
>
>
> Quality is the responsibility of the *whole team*. Quality control is most
> > efficiently achieved if software quality is considered at *every step in
> > the development cycle*. A software quality process will benefit from an
> > appropriate distribution of test automation ownership between teams
> > cooperating in a software development effort.
>
>
> In other words: QA aren't the only ones responsible for tests. I would go a
> step (or several) further and explicitly suggest that testing needs to be
> considered at—or an integral part of—the design & planning processes.
> Rich Hickey goes even further in his talk about "Hammock Driven
> Development"
> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc> (highly recommended: TL;DR;
> people start work before fully understanding the problem space).
>
> Things seem to be trending up at WMF, especially w/ the Web engineers' big
strides in end-to-end testing. However, as the
article suggests, you need
to attack the quality problem from both ends—perhaps even emphasizing unit
tests (shortest feedback, cheapest, least fragile).
>
> 0:
>
>
http://engineering.linkedin.com/developer-happiness/getting-code-production…
> 1:
>
http://engineering.linkedin.com/sites/default/files/InitialState-Fun.png,
> thanks to Zeljko for introducing me to that fun term, much better than
> "upside-down pyramid"
>
> --
> EN Wikipedia user page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Brian.gerstle
> IRC: bgerstle
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