Project Management

User acceptance testing is sometimes regarded as the red-headed stepchild of testing. Most of us tend to focus on functional and performance testing, and in doing so forget who it is we're actually developing the application for. Kevin Au makes the case that a formal process for user acceptance testing should be instituted on almost every project. Because no matter how well developed a product is, if the user doesn't like it, it'll soon be shelfware.

Users find 25 percent of your defects after your software goes live, according to a recent study. In addition to being expensive to fix, these post-ship defects often prove impossible to find due to the many potential user environments out there. Flight recorders are new tools, named after those already present on aircraft, that trace the execution of an application in or before production. Their job is to collect information while the system runs. Then, if a problem or failure occurs, you can examine the trace file and discover what operations led to the problem without actually having to recreate the problem.

Everyone pays lip service to the importance of unit testing, but rarely do developers actually integrate unit testing into their daily routine. In the spirit of eXtreme Programming, this presentation offers a simple two-class framework for automating unit tests in three popular languages: C++, Java, and C. No GUI, no templates, just a fast and productive way of organizing and running suites of unit tests. You'll walk away wondering how you have done without this simple technique for so long.

How many times have you finished testing on a release and said "Boy, I never want to go through one like that again." Or have you ever had a project canceled and said "If only I would have known at the beginning, what I know now, I would have done things a lot differently." Or when you finished testing on release one, said “next time I want to do it differently,” then said the same thing on releases two, three, and four? If any of these thoughts resonate with you, then I think you will be interested in the Lessons Learned process. Lessons Learned is a powerful post-mortem process that can be used at the end of a project, phase, or deliverable to evaluate how things went, and what could be improved.