Baking in Quality to Software Development

One of the reasons my organizations switched to Ruby on Rails for software development was the great integration with automated testing. We always wanted to have good test coverage on our software applications (which are web applications – some used only inside our organization) but didn’t actually find the time to do so. Since we adopted Ruby we have been doing much better in this regard. It isn’t just the switch to Ruby, of course, but the switch to Ruby coincided with the beginning of many improvements to our software development practices that have continually improved over the last couple of years.

Here is a post on How to build quality software by an agile, Ruby, lean software developer

I’ve mentioned previously about baking-in quality and not having developers throw code over a wall to testers.

Everyone on the team is concerned with not only assuring quality in what we deliver, but making it visible to ourselves and the business.

We work in an agile manner, iterating through development with extreme programming practices and Behaviour Driven Development. Facilitating our relationship with the business is Scrum and we utilise kanban principles and systems thinking to maintain a speedy throughput of high-quality work. This mixture allows us to communicate effectively, develop the correct features properly and continuously deploy our work when it is complete, thus maximising business value. I should also mention that we are fortunate enough to have our business people/customer sat across from us.

Without testers or a QA team there is no wall over which work can be thrown and the responsibility for quality absolved.

The inspection typically carried out end-of-cycle only yields bugs that were low severity and of no real impact to the end user.

An agile testing must-have, we use TeamCity to continuously run our unit tests on each check-in. We also execute our Cucumber acceptance tests on scheduled runs. The status of the builds are visible on dedicated monitors around the office as well as a nice 6”² projected screen.

via: @benjaminm

Related: Combinatorial Testing for SoftwareChecklists in Software DevelopmentSoftware Supporting Processes Not the Other Way AroundSoftware Development and Business Process SupportTop Blogs for Software DevelopmentHexawise: more coverage, fewer tests (my brother’s company)

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