24 hour testing

Dee Boulahanis's picture

Hi,

My upper management team is asking for us to explore a 24 hour testing model. I would like to hear some feedback from all of you on what works well and what does not work in a 24 hour model. What benifits have you gained? Have you been able to cut down the amount of time required for testing? Is testing completed faster?

They are looking for me to implement this a.s.a.p and while I am not apposeed to it I am not sure what we will gain? We have a pretty complex enviornment where we have Iseries, Delphi, Java, Oracle 10G, 11G, OAS and SOA all intergrating together and our business model is also complex so it takes a long time to train test analysts.

Any feedback would be fantastic.

1 Answer

Matthew Heusser's picture

Hello Dee -

The argument for 24 hour testing is a bit painting a house, you can get more done. "better yet", the argument goes, "development ends the day and testing picks up."

It sounds great.

In reality, having the two groups working separately covers over some problems. for example, the batch size here, the length of time coding, is eight hours. I'd rather tighten that, get some back and forth going. Also, if you need testing because there are problems with the code, it is possible, even likely, that the offshore or elsewhere or other-time testing group gets blocked - and there is no one there to un-block them.

In an extreme example, login is broken, so the "testers" start at 6:00PM local and immediately get blocked. The next day, the programmers fix login, but the user does not have the right permission to do the new feature, or the new feature is not visibile after login, or there is a database problem, or or or  - and nothing gets done overnight, even though the company pays for "work" all night. If defects are high and fixing is slow, 24 hour testing can actually be a expensive and wasteful process.

Alternatively, 24 hour a day montioring of production - that can be very valuable.

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