Frustrations with Test & Dev Environments

[DarrenSmith_EA]

Hi,

I am working on some research for Test and Development Environments, and I am really interested in hearing peoples stories around how they use the environments, any day to day niggles they have when using them, things they wish were different, any annoyances etc and would love to hear what works well too.

I would really appreciate any feedback on the above and thanks in advance

Regards
Darren

[jim2007]

What kind of testing are you talking about? The testing a developer does at his desktop, the company’s formal testing environment?

[DarrenSmith_EA]

Either to be honest, I am not a developer so I would love to get an understanding of what actually happens over what the process says should happen in any environment. I know most people will have little "work arounds" for parts of the process they feel don't work or are broken.

[jim2007]

Well most places of any size at this point runs some kind of CI environment and you follow the procedures - you write your code as required, check it in, it gets checked out, built, deployed, tested and if all goes well you don’t hear anything. If not you get a report of some kind, fix your code and start again. The only real issues are code covering and dependence... at this stage these environments are pretty mature.

[DarrenSmith_EA]

Well most places of any size at this point runs some kind of CI environment and you follow the procedures - you write your code as required, check it in, it gets checked out, built, deployed, tested and if all goes well you don’t hear anything. If not you get a report of some kind, fix your code and start again. The only real issues are code covering and dependence... at this stage these environments are pretty mature.

Thanks for this, have you ever experienced the above not working as expected?

[jim2007]

No not in about 15 years. The technology is mature at this stage.

One big issue is where tests are unknowingly dependent on each other. For example one person creates a test based on a set of data in a text file, then another person decides to built a test based on the same file and yet another until there are maybe 100 tests using the file. Then someone one changes the file and suddenly 99 tests are failing and all the developers are rightly saying: I did not change anything.... a lot of effort can be lost sorting these things out.

[TonyBurgos]

I am one the people test based on the same file and yet another until there are maybe 100 tests using the file