What is a good software test?
When your projects start growing, you want to make sure those last changes didn’t compromise how well your system was working. In large applications, manual tests after every build would be extremely time consuming. And here’s where the beauty of automated software testing comes in handy.
Every time a new build was created, all the batteries of automated software tests would run. When all the indicators were green, we would breath again, congratulate each other, and move on.
However, the best software tests aren’t those that end up with all indicators in green. The really insightful ones are those tests that blink in red. Because it’s a fact that every software application of a certain size has bugs. Good tests point those bugs out.
I vividly remember a couple of situations where a test I designed would “complain” after a round of upgrades, on modules that either my partners or me had coded. At first, it wasn’t clear what made the test fail, and one of the situations even ended up with an additional meeting with our final client to clarify some specific points. And the good thing is that, thanks to these tests, we detected a problem, we found the exact issue, and we solved it.
This safety after each build, and this understanding of the application, wouldn’t have been possible without our test systems. And that’s what makes software testing so important.
Experience writing software tests
I’ve been in charge of creating the main batteries of automated software tests in a couple of big projects, and I make sure that every long project of a respectable size comes with a decently sized battery of tests. Most of my software tests have been created using the JUnit and PHPUnit frameworks.
I’m used to track down – and fix – bugs in different systems, languages and applications, and to find fixes that solve the bug reports of my clients and my final users, providing them appropriate support. I’m also used to perform interface tests and cross-browser compatibility tests in website front-ends.
Do you want to make sure your application performs as it should – and that it stays that way with each new build? If you need somebody to write software tests for your application, then we can work together.