Mark’s Site

After my last few years of development, one thing I’ve learned that separates the good developers from the bad is the extent to which they test their applications.

Fast developers Can Often Mean Many Bugs

I used to rush my code thinking I was impressing people by getting things done so quickly/efficiently, but the truth comes back to whack you in the face. They’re called bugs And believe me, your boss may like you initially, but they will not end up liking you so much when clients bring back software complaining about obvious bugs and expect the bugs to be removed free of charge. Not covering yourself like that is bad business and will quickly give you a bad reputation. The way to cover yourself from a business point of view is testing. Comprehensive testing.

Walk Through Each Page and Test

If you want to consider yourself a good developer, get used to testing your work like mad. You need to get into the habit of walking yourself through every screen left to right, top to bottom, filling out every field and not filling out every field to see what the consequences are and to make sure you have considered everything.

When Testing Gets Too Hard

I find the hardest testing comes from complicated security systems, where you have different levels of security per screen and the screens acting differently depending on what level of security a user has, because in testing, you have to login as EACH different security type and go through each screen. When you get to applications of this size/complexity and you find testing is just taking too much of your time, you need to get a person(s) in to become a tester for your application. They then do the job of testing your work and telling you where the bugs are.

But I’m On A Deadline

The best piece of advice I can give to anyone in development is, if you are finding yourself stressed by deadlines and you don’t have time to test (which is a very common excuse) talk to your manager/boss and explain to them the importance of them allowing you more time to test your code before it’s released. If you work on a medium/large project, maybe consider getting a full time tester in to work with the developers. The best thing to say is the truth, which is, if managers do not give you longer deadlines to test your code and make it bug free, the clients will find the bugs, forcing them to give the code back expecting you to fix it for free. Lots of testing time should always be included in a good development project schedule. If you get the extra time, and use it well, your code will become bulletproof as far as bugs are concerned. Your boss will just get used to allocating more hours for testing time and everyone wins!