Carnegie Quality

Have you ever been in this situation? You’re 6 weeks into a 4 week test cycle. The defect count is not going down, you’ve got over half of your test scenarios left to run, and everyone keeps asking - when is testing going to complete?

Sound familiar? Unfortunately, we’ve all been there before. Of course, the real answer is that you shouldn’t be in test - you’re probably stuck in a code and fix mode, which is very difficult to get out of. Better to do some analysis and find out why test is faltering (break out the Ishikawa diagram or your favorite problem solving technique), and go back to another build cycle. Of course the reality is that project management and the business sponsors don’t want to hear that the project needs to go “backwards”. So you’re stuck in test and need to provide an estimate.

Even if development cannot provide an accurate estimate, the test team probably can. Here’s why - you’re several weeks into a test cycle. If you’ve been doing things properly you have some great test statistics that can answer this question.

Read more for details and a template that can help.

History’s Worst Software Bugs, an article from Wired News, is making a lot of people’s blogs. If you haven’t yet read it, I highly recommend it.

I’ve never had an experience with someone dying from a project I was on, but here’s my story. Back in the mid-90’s I was working at a telecommunications firm managing the development of a custom client-server VB application. It was an order-entry system for ISDN that interfaced to the telco’s Service Order mainframe. We had just gone live when the mainframe had an abend. If you haven’t worked with mainframes before, an abend is bad news - think blue screen of death, only much, much worse. After some investigation it was determined that our application sent over a carriage return, which crashed the mainframe. We then did some investigation and found that a user had opened up Notepad to write some comments and then pasted the comments, with carriage returns, into the comments field in our application, which we merrily sent along to the mainframe. Needless to say we both modified code to strip out carriage returns, but it goes to show that if there’s a way to break your software, you can be sure users will find it!