Software development testing

Table of Contents. Improve Article. Save Article. Like Article. Last Updated : 31 Jul, Recommended Articles. Article Contributed By :. Easy Normal Medium Hard Expert. Writing code in comment? External-facing APIs are where "design up front"—and consideration about future use cases—really matters.

Changing APIs is a pain for us and for our users, and creating backwards incompatibility is horrible although sometimes impossible to avoid. Design external facing APIs carefully, still keeping to the "simple things should be simple" principle. If a function or method goes past 30 lines of code, consider breaking it up. A good maximum module size is about lines. Test files tend to be longer than this.

Readability of an individual test file is more important than maintainability breaking out reusable chunks. Refactor whenever you see the need and have the chance. Programming is about abstractions, and the closer your abstractions map to the problem domain, the easier your code is to understand and maintain. As systems grow organically, they need to change structure for their expanding use case.

Systems outgrow their abstractions and structure, and not changing them becomes technical debt that is more painful and slower and more buggy to work around. Include the cost of clearing technical debt refactoring within the estimates for feature work.

The longer you leave the debt around, the higher the interest it accumulates. Make code correct first and fast second. When working on performance issues, always profile before making fixes. Usually the bottleneck is not quite where you thought it was.

With the usual note that adding timing code always changes the performance characteristics of the code, making performance work one of the more frustrating tasks.

Smaller, more tightly scoped unit tests give more valuable information when they fail—they tell you specifically what is wrong. A test that stands up half the system to test behavior takes more investigation to determine what is wrong. Generally a test that takes more than 0. With tightly scoped unit tests testing behavior, your tests act as a de facto specification for your code. Ideally if someone wants to understand your code, they should be able to turn to the test suite as "documentation" for the behavior.

On the other hand, code is the enemy, and owning more code than necessary is bad. Consider the trade-off when introducing a new dependency. Shared code ownership is the goal; siloed knowledge is bad. At a minimum, this means discussing or documenting design decisions and important implementation decisions. Code review is the worst time to start discussing design decisions as the inertia to make sweeping changes after code has been written is hard to overcome.

Generators rock! Programming is a balancing act, however. Over-engineering onion architecture is as painful to work with as under-designed code. Design Patterns is a classic programming book that every engineer should read. Fixing or deleting intermittently failing tests is painful, but worth the effort.

Generally, particularly in tests, wait for a specific change rather than sleeping for an arbitrary amount of time. Voodoo sleeps are hard to understand and slow down your test suite. Always see your test fail at least once. Put a deliberate bug in and make sure it fails, or run the test before the behavior under test is complete. And finally, a point for management: Constant feature grind is a terrible way to develop software.

Not addressing technical debt slows down development and results in a worse, more buggy product. Thanks to the Ansible team, and especially to Wayne Witzel , for comments and suggestions for improving the principles suggested in this list. Want to break free from the IT processes and complexities holding you back from peak performance?

Download this free eBook: Teaching an elephant to dance. The idea of comments degenerating over time into "lies" is one that I agree with. At one former job, working alongside the esteemed Mr Foord the article author , we were all in the habit of simply referring to all comments as "lies", without forethought or malice.

As in "The module has some lies at the top explaining that behaviour. This is like saying that new tires end up being worn out, so drive only on smooth roads and only downhill, so you don't have to use tires. Lazy developers find excuses for not writing comments. The fact is that there is no such thing as perfectly readable code. What's readable to one person is a complete ball of mud to others. Skip to content. Software Testing Software Testing is a method to check whether the actual software product matches expected requirements and to ensure that software product is Defect free.

Why Software Testing is Important? What are the benefits of Software Testing? Here are the benefits of using software testing: Cost-Effective: It is one of the important advantages of software testing.

Testing any IT project on time helps you to save your money for the long term. In case if the bugs caught in the earlier stage of software testing, it costs less to fix. Security: It is the most vulnerable and sensitive benefit of software testing. People are looking for trusted products. It helps in removing risks and problems earlier. Product quality: It is an essential requirement of any software product. Testing ensures a quality product is delivered to customers. Customer Satisfaction: The main aim of any product is to give satisfaction to their customers.

Types of Software Testing Here are the software testing types: Typically Testing is classified into three categories. Program Testing Program Testing in software testing is a method of executing an actual software program with the aim of testing program behavior and finding errors.