October SeaSPIN Meeting: Don't Test Too Much - Or Too Little October 5, 2010

Seattle & Eastside Area
Software Process Improvement Network
Monthly Meeting
Free and Open to the Software Engineering & IT Community

Food & networking from 5:45 to 6:15 (pizza, salad, soda )
Announcements from 6:15 to 6:30
Presentation from 6:30 to 7:45
Q & A from 7:45 to 8:15
Doors close at 8:30

Don’t test too much! [or too little]
(Lessons learned the hard way)
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Presented by Keith Stobie, Microsoft

Over-testing can actually be as bad for you as under testing. Whether it is testing to your own lofty expectations (versus those of the project), verifying too much in stress or verifying too much in one test, you might end up with a less useful result than other approaches. You must also be careful of under- testing sequence and state or aspects of the software that are just hard to verify.

This experience report relates parables of mistakes I made and what I learned in the process, so you can avoid these mistakes. These lessons learned are also cross indexed to the book: Lessons Learned in Software Testing (Kaner, Bach, and Pettichord).

Bio:
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Keith Stobie is a Test Architect for Bing Infrastructure at Microsoft where he plans, designs, and reviews software architecture and tests. Previously Keith worked in the Protocol Engineering Team on Protocol Quality Assurance Process including model based testing (MBT) to develop test framework, harnessing, and model patterns. With twenty five years of distributed systems testing experience Keith's interest are in testing methodology, tools technology, and quality process. . Keith has a BS in computer science from Cornell University.
ASQ Certified Software Quality Engineer, ASTQB Foundation Level
Member: ACM, IEEE, ASQ