Maplewood Software - Testing and Quality Assurance

Testing and Quality Assurance
W. Edwards Deming of TQM fame was fond of saying, "Let's make toast the American way, you burn, I'll scrape." He was critical of a manufacturing process that produced faulty output. He felt a good manufacturing process would not require any quality assurance waste. Manufacturing principles don't stay faithful when one is manufacturing software. With software, testing has been shown to be a cost effective and essential part of the manufacturing process.

When one compares manufacturing to software development, it would be more appropriate to compare the manufacture of a prototype to the development of software. A software program development effort cumulates in the completion of one software program. The manufacturing process that produces a pen is design to produce thousands of those pens. The very process of trial and error required to get the pen production line working is similar to the process of producing the software program. As a result, testing becomes critical because it determines if the right pen is being produced a thousand times.

Design Review
Things are not always used according to design. That is why Quality Assurance starts during design. Maplewood Software starts by reviewing designs by our customers. Once a design is approved by a customer, the design gets reviewed with a number of engineers to confirm the resulting product will stand up to abuse and be easy to learn and use.

Functional Testing
As the product is being developed it is being tested according to the functional standard established. This means we develop tests at the same time we develop solutions. Functional testing also means we test to make sure the software can’t do something wrong.

Performance Testing
Performance Testing is often treated like frosting on a cake when it should be treated like filling. The time to resolve a performance issue is during development, not when development is completed. Performance should be addressed at the beginning, middle, and end of the development process.

Regression Testing
Regression Testing is automated testing designed to continue to test completed portion of a program. Load testing also automated testing that gets performed on completed software. Regression Testing is how we stay confident a system still works. Regression testing is very important for code reuse.

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