Testing strategies for developers are often seen as lacking import. To be honest, developers are in their role to write code, not provide quality assurance. However, that does not excuse the implementers from being part of testing and sharing that work.
Simple Testing Strategies For Developers
The strength of developers is creating solutions, not testing them. That is not a knock on developers, we all tend to be weak at verifying our work. Thus, effective QA work by developers requires a methodical approach that overcomes any biases we have towards our solution. The methods that work tend to be easy to understand, implement, and repeat for any environment. In this episode. we look at a common sense approach that will help the coders on the team be more helpful in the QA phases of a life cycle.
Useful Unit Tests
Unit testing is a challenge to implement, but it is becoming less of one. Automation and simple to use tools like JUnit make it easier for developers to test as they write or even use tests to drive implementation. However, the approach to testing is often the simplest path (happy path). Thus, the areas of an application that need the most testing are not in scope. As a developer, it is important for your productivity to catch errors early in the implementation phase. Better yet, catch them before they get released to others.
The time spent on developing meaningful tests is not a waste for a developer. This practice will help you dig deeper into the expected effects of code as well as the potential errors and exceptions. So, even though we may not enjoy writing tests, doing so makes us better developers.
