TDD Archives - Galaxy Weblinks

This is the second in a series of blog posts in which we outline the roadmap to TDD for your organization and how to choose the right experts for your projects. Find Part 1 here. TDD works in very small increments of coding a test, writing the program code, and improving the code. This results in many (in fact hundreds) of automated small tests that need to be executed. This is not easy, especially when it comes to legacy code, proper unit test isolation, and other integration tests. To ensure that the people you are going to bring on board have mastered that, you have to understand the factors to consider while collaborating with them. Below are the important aspects that you should not ignore while hiring dedicated testers and QA team for projects based on the TDD process:

Skills Needed

Technical and Analytical Skills of Business Analysts:

Ability to analyze a set of techniques and tasks to be used to work as a liaison among stakeholders and recommend solutions that enable the organization to achieve its goals.
Collecting requirements and analyzing how they’ll work as a product. And what will be the future problems they may face. According to that unit tests are defined and the acceptance criteria are defined for further development.

Technical Skills of Testers/Developers:

Writing a unit test before writing the code and able to write code sufficiently to make a failing test pass.
Expertise in “test-driven bug fixing”, i.e. when a defect is found, writes a test exposing the defect before correction.
Knows and can name several tactics to guide the writing of tests (for instance “when testing a recursive algorithm, first write a test for the recursion terminating case”).
Able to factor out reusable elements from existing unit tests, through using situation-specific testing tools.
Creating a “roadmap” of planned unit tests for macroscopic features (and revising it as necessary).
Ability to “test drive” a variety of design paradigms: event-driven, functional, and object-oriented; Also the technical domains like persistent data access, user interfaces, and computation.

Soft skills of QA manager:

Communicate properly with non-technical as well as technical people, especially explaining the technical challenges to the management team.
Understand the client provided specs and visualize a real-time business situation. He/She must also be ready for a knowledge-sharing session with either his/her team or higher management every time the situation arises.
Must also have a strong programming base to keep up with their team w.r.t. understanding what the client needs.

How To Pick the Right Team?

Evaluate your company’s methodology: If you’re a startup or an established firm looking for an overhaul in methodologies, then it’s important to determine what type of team you prefer that can successfully collaborate with your company. Check out websites and portfolios: A company’s website is the face you can judge it by. If the website works smoothly and the interface and user experience are user-centric, it means the company pays a great deal of attention to details. Assess the testing experience of the team: It is important to find out what types of testing a team can provide in general; what approach the team applies in each particular case, and understand what tests the team has performed on specific projects. Find out the industry focus of tested products: The quality assurance and testing team you hire needs to be experienced in testing apps or websites similar to yours. Compare the size/complexity of the company’s projects with yours: The size/complexity of the project also matters a lot. If a QA team has worked only on simple projects, it may not be ready to step up on a large and more complex project and test it comprehensively.

Asking The Right Questions

In-depth questions will help you learn how they create and maintain quality assurance procedures, as well as filter out what meets your requirements. Here are some examples of questions you should ask: – What will TDD give us that we can’t get by building tests later? This question will help determine how well they understand and practice the benefits of TDD as mentioned above in the benefits section. – What quality assurance and testing process do you use and why? Gauge their understanding of QA processes and whether they have experience establishing these processes. This will also include the type of model they use to design the test plan. – What are the best practices, automation toolkits, and testing methodologies the team employs? This will enable you to understand the general testing approaches the team uses. Whether the team knows how to do automation testing, how they use automation testing, and with what tools they conduct it. – Do you use TDD for accessibility concerns as well? Since accessible features are getting a lot of attention, you can ask about their plans and involvement of accessibility concerns in your project. The concerns such as “does the correct ARIA hints are used for components?” and “is the correct semantic markup being used?” can be easily unit tested. -How will you evaluate that testing was successful? At this stage, specific expectations of testing may be revealed. Often, expectations don’t match that can be usually obtained through testing. In this case, it’s important to explain what exactly is impossible to do and why. -What will be the format for bug reports and testing results? This will help you agree on a specific format of bug reporting and testing results to ensure that you have all the information you need.

Conclusion

Collaboratively discuss the complete project with the team and clear all the queries that you may have in your mind. Remember to be transparent, honest, and open about everything. Define your budget prior. Use the opportunity to build a personal connection with the offshore development agency. This rapport will decide to work with you in a better manner. Not only the Quality Assurance team, but you can also hire highly skilled developers, designers, testers, and digital product development experts. We follow agile methodologies like TDD to build robust custom applications for our clients. Contact us to know more about the development process and how we can help you to build and launch your application. About Galaxy Weblinks We specialize in delivering end-to-end software design & development services and have hands-on experience with automation testing in agile development environments. Our engineers, QA analysts, and developers help improve security, reliability, and features to make sure your business application and IT structure scale and remain secure.

This is the first in a series of blog posts in which we outline the benefits of TDD for your organization and what are the projects to consider while adopting this agile process. Link of Part Two. Test-Driven Development essentially lets the testing process drive the development and design of your application. This incorporates acceptance tests, functional tests, and unit tests. It leads you to create very different kinds of tests that tend to be more resilient to change in the future because you’re verifying behaviors rather than testing pieces of code. If you are asking why TDD, we will just say that “it’s the easiest way to get both good test coverage and good quality code, which leads to 40%-80% fewer bugs in production”. Wouldn’t it be better to write the code in a manner where a bug can be spotted immediately and not after the production stage? If this sounds good to you, let’s go to the next step. How do you successfully roll out TDD in your organization with the right team? We’ll explore this here, as well as share some important insights on TDD.

What Are The Expected Benefits of TDD?

Better designed, extensible, and cleaner code: It helps to understand how the code will interact with other modules and will be used. It results in more maintainable code and better design decisions. It helps in writing smaller code having single responsibility rather than monolithic procedures with multiple responsibilities. This makes the code simpler to understand. Reduced Scrap work and Time to Repair: TDD allows problems to be detected as early as possible, which has the effect of reducing the number of bugs. De facto, the technical debt is better controlled with a reusable, maintainable, and flexible code that allows the addition of new functionalities and reduces time to repair. Eliminates fear of change: Developers get quick alerts when a code change introduces a bug, and TDD’s tight feedback loop quickly notifies them when it’s fixed. Better code coverage: It provides better code coverage than writing tests after the fact. Because we create code to make a specific test pass, code coverage will be close to 100%. Faster developer feedback loop: Without TDD, developers are supposed to manually test each change to make sure that it works. With TDD, unit tests can run on-change automatically, allowing faster-debugging sessions and feedback during development.

Common Pitfalls of TDD

Time-Intensive: While TDD generally results in higher-quality code, it is often a time-consuming process. But at the same time creating and maintaining a test suite, in addition to the software itself, is a significant investment. Many teams have seen significant reductions in defect rates, at the cost of a moderate increase in the initial development effort. Increased Overhead: The TDD process involves a great deal of overhead in the form of unit tests. Poor choices of testing, design, or architecture strategy at the early stage can be difficult to recover later in the project. Hence, it becomes difficult or impossible to make changes in the codebase without making dozens or hundreds of existing tests fail. Whereas, businesses that prefer to invest time in manual QA, or the ones that lack the technical resources to implement unit tests, are not the ideal candidates for TDD.

Choosing projects for TDD

Existing Project (Legacy code) And New Projects A common TDD implementation problem rears its ugly head when an organization has inherited a system that wasn’t built with testability in mind. In such scenarios, questions arise like — Should the code be refactored? If so, how much refactoring is important to start practicing TDD in an achievable, and meaningful way? So, if the legacy code is already out there and working, the risk associated with the technical debt is low relative to the risk of new untested work. By applying TDD to the new code you’re writing, i.e., making changes in the existing code, you minimize the risk as well as don’t increase the technical debt.

Microservices

Microservice-based architectures have far more complexities and dependencies than traditional application stacks. Creating tests for microservices-based applications and other complex architectures can be difficult due to the requirement for advanced stubbing and mocking. A microservice-based architecture, however, presents the opportunity to leverage TDD best practices in a very efficient way. The TDD pragmatist approach becomes very useful when you think about treating the microservice as the unit, rather than the compilation unit.

Who should use it?

Most organizations simply do not have enough developers or time to cover all of their use-cases. This is especially true for enterprises that have a mix of skills and roles contributing to their projects. Leveraging TDD helps address the issue of limited technical resources by defining tests against the contract. With this approach, stakeholders, business analysts, testers, and other non-developer resources together can contribute to the TDD testing efforts since the Requirement Gathering phase.

Conclusion:

TDD is a process that helps you start development projects with a healthy base of tests to ensure software quality throughout the development lifecycle. It helps you to produce maintainable, testable, and efficient code. But real-world conditions do not always make TDD adoption easy. It depends totally on your product requirement and can be made easier with the kind of team you have onboard. Contact us to know more about the development process and how we can help you to build and launch your application. In Part Two, we enumerated the skills and factors to consider while picking the best team. And we highlighted the right questions to ask the team to ensure how your requirements will be met w.r.t. the project. About Galaxy Weblinks We specialize in delivering end-to-end software design & development services and have hands-on experience with automation testing in agile development environments. Our engineers, QA analysts, and developers help improve security, reliability, and features to make sure your business application and IT structure scale and remain secure.

Category: TDD

Test-Driven Development (TDD): How to choose the Right Team To Drive TDD (Part 2)