Exploration Through Example

Example-driven development, Agile testing, context-driven testing, Agile programming, Ruby, and other things of interest to Brian Marick
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Thu, 06 Nov 2003

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I find the following quote (from Laurent Bossavit, part of a longer post) pretty evocative, though I can't quite say yet what it evokes.

Or consider a related model, "Baumol's cost disease": industries where productivity remains constant will have increasing costs, because the industries where rising productivity is keeping costs down can raise wages to attract workers. To keep costs down, flat-productivity industries may have to lower quality.

Perhaps this is even directly applicable to software development. Consider the productivity of programming compared to that of testing/debugging (the old-fashioned kind). Today it is possible to write code in one hour that does a lot more than one hour's worth of coding thirty years ago: there's huge amounts of function in the OS, in the core class libraries, etc. But the productivity of testing remains constant: there's only so much complexity you can poke and prod given one hour of debugging. So the trend would be toward testing becoming ever more costly compared to development, leading to less testing being done in order to keep costs down, leading to more quality problems.

Blogs on testing from Microsoft (via Tim van Tongeren): Sara Ford, Josh Ledgard, and Joe Bork.

## Posted at 07:43 in category /misc [permalink] [top]

About Brian Marick
I consult mainly on Agile software development, with a special focus on how testing fits in.

Contact me here: marick@exampler.com.

 

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Agile Testing Directions
Introduction
Tests and examples
Technology-facing programmer support
Business-facing team support
Business-facing product critiques
Technology-facing product critiques
Testers on agile projects
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Working your way out of the automated GUI testing tarpit
  1. Three ways of writing the same test
  2. A test should deduce its setup path
  3. Convert the suite one failure at a time
  4. You should be able to get to any page in one step
  5. Extract fast tests about single pages
  6. Link checking without clicking on links
  7. Workflow tests remain GUI tests
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Design-Driven Test-Driven Design
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Making it (barely) run
Views and presenters appear
Hooking up the real GUI

 

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