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With 2014 in
full swing, we have an exciting and thought-provoking newsletter in
store for you.
This month,
we feature a guest article from James Coplien. He's a fellow
software professional that I've known for about a decade, and I have
tremendous respect for his thoughts on software development. He
has been spending time recently thinking about and working with
clients on testing, especially unit testing. He has come to
some conclusions, based on solid computer science, that I promise
will surprise you. Agree or disagree with his thoughts, you'll
get real value from wrestling with his challenge to some of the
current orthodoxy on this topic. You can read the first segment
of his article below, and can find the rest of it on our articles
page. I thank Cope for contributing this article for our
newsletter.
What's coming
up soon? How about a pair of excellent conferences! The
ASTQB will hold its first conference--which we hope will be an annual
event--in San Francisco in March. Software Test Professionals,
our partner in our successful webinar series and, new in 2014,
virtual and live trainings, holds its spring biannual conference in
New Orleans in April. RBCS is proud to sponsor both
conferences, and we'll be offering public training prior to each
conference for those who want to maximize their training
dollars. I hope to see you there.
Speaking of
our webinar series, we have completed planning for the webinars for
the rest of 2014. That schedule is now posted on our website,
along with our public training schedule. Join the tens of
thousands of people worldwide who have taken advantage of these
opportunities to learn new ideas on testing in the coming months.
These
learning opportunities also extend to those who work as business
analysts and requirements engineers. Many testers fill these
roles as well as being professional testers. Whether you work
as a tester only or fill both roles, our course on business analysis
and requirements engineering is a solid foundation for what
constitutes properly written requirements, in sequential,
incremental, and agile lifecycles. We support the IBAQB, IIBA,
and IREB certifications. You can find more information below.
Finally, we
continue to enjoy great feedback from our clients, webinar attendees,
and other software professionals on our offerings. We include a
few testimonials below.
I hope you
enjoy the February newsletter as much as we enjoyed putting it
together.
Regards,
Rex Black,
President
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Attend RBCS' ISTQB Advanced
Level Training Week before the ASTQB Conference!
Discount applies to RBCS
course registration only and not for conference registration
fee. Discount cannot be combined with any other discount or
offer.
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 Why
Most Unit Testing is Waste
written by James O
Coplien
Unit testing
was a staple of the FORTRAN days, when a function was a function and
was sometimes worthy of functional testing. Computers computed, and
functions and procedures represented units of computation. In those
days the dominant design process composed complex external
functionality from smaller chunks, which in turn orchestrated yet
smaller chunks, and so on down to the level of well-understood
primitives. Each layer supported the layers above it. You actually
stood a good chance that you could trace the functionality of the
things at the bottom, called functions and procedures, to the
requirements that gave rise to them out at the human interface. There
was some hope that a good designer could understand a given
function's business purpose. And it was possible, at least in
well-structured code, to reason about the calling tree. You could
mentally simulate code execution in a code review.
Object
orientation slowly took the world by storm, and it turned the design
world upside-down. First, the design units changed from
things-that-computed to small heterogeneous composites called objects
that combine several programming artefacts, including functions and
data, together inside one wrapper. The object paradigm used classes
to wrap several functions together with the specifications of the
data global to those functions. The class became a cookie cutter from
which objects were created at run time. In a given computing context,
the exact function to be called is determined at run-time and cannot
be deduced from the source code as it could in FORTRAN. That made it
impossible to reason about run-time behaviour of code by inspection
alone. You had to run the program to get the faintest idea of what
was going on.
So, testing
became in again. And it was unit testing with a vengeance. The object
community had discovered the value of early feedback, propelled by
the increasing speed of machines and by the rise in the number of
personal computers. Design became much more data-focused because
objects were shaped more by their data structure than by any
properties of their methods. The lack of any explicit calling
structure made it difficult to place any single function execution in
the context of its execution. What little chance there might have
been to do so was taken away by polymorphism. So integration testing
was out; unit testing was in. System testing was still somewhere
there in the background but seemed either to become someone else's
problem or, more dangerously, was run by the same people who wrote
the code as kind of a grown-up version of unit testing.
Classes became
the units of analysis and, to some degree, of design. CRC cards
(popularly representing Classes, Responsibilities, and Collaborators)
were a popular design technique where each class was represented by a
person. Object orientation became synonymous with anthropomorphic
design. Classes additionally became the units of administration,
design focus and programming, and their anthropomorphic nature gave
the master of each class a yearning to test it. And because few class
methods came with the same contextualization that a FORTRAN function
did, programmers had to provide context before exercising a method
(remember that we don't test classes and we don't even test objects -
the unit of functional test is a method). Unit tests provided the
drivers to take methods through their paces. Mocks provided the
context of the environmental state and of the other methods on which
the method under test depending. And test environments came with
facilities to poise each object in the right state in preparation for
the test.
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IIBA
News 
Do you
receive the International Institute of Business Analysis
Newsletter? In December 2013, RBCS sponsored the
"Play to Win" segment. Congratulations to the winner,
Matthew Hunt! For answering the quiz question
correctly, Hunt won complimentary access the RBCS Requirements Engineering Foundation E-learning
course (a $799 value)!
The Requirements Engineering Foundation course is
based on both the IIBA® (International Institute of Business
Analysts) and IREB (International Requirements Engineering Board)
bodies of knowledge. This course is an excellent preparation
course for the IIBA®, IREB, and the IBAQB (International Business
Analysis Qualifications Board) certification exams. This course
explores not just why the requirements matter, but how to gather the
right requirements, document them effectively and ensure that they
are properly implemented. It explores the roles of the
requirements engineer and business analyst both in ferreting out the
requirements and interacting with the project team to ensure the
customer gets the product they want and need. In this course
you will learn effective techniques to select the right people from
whom you will elicit the requirements.
For more information on this course, email us or visit our store today!
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Complimentary
Webinars
Did
you miss the complimentary webinar, "Ten Bugs that Shook the
World", on January 2, 2014? Check out what you missed!
Webinar
attendees are automatically entered into a drawing to win their
choice of one of our green e-learning courses. Visit our training page to
see the complete webinar schedule, or just look on this email, sign
up for a webinar, show up at whichever webinar session is most
convenient, and--who knows--you might be the lucky winner of some
valuable free training. Either way, you're sure to learn
something.
Congratulations Alex
Martins an attendee of the January webinar, for
being selected as the winner of an e-learning course.
Register
now for our next complimentary webinar, "Testers in 2015 and Beyond," on March
13, 2014.
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People
are Talking about RBCS
"I just
finished reading of the 4 articles on your Articles section (I spent at least 8
hours overall, on and off, but very worthy!)
Once again,
you generously shared your knowledge without any cost to testing
community. I have attempted to read this set for at least a
year but finally managed to read them due to an urgent need to guide
my QA lead on rating test project and product quality (Red Yellow
Green).
The articles
summarized and explained on project, product and process metrics so
well that I would urge everyone in my team to read it and shared with
the QA Management team as well. The articles are interesting to
read with a hint of humor and it was also proof read professionally
and yet it is "free". Just cannot thank you
enough for it. Thank you and happy new year. May 2014 be
a wonderful year for RBCS!"
-Vicky Chen
QA
Manager, Royal Bank of Canada
regarding
the articles page on the RBCS website
"Thanks
to Rex and RBCS team for the insightful webinars with real-world
practical experience as opposed to those marketing-oriented ones.
What Rex does is much more credible as it has the "been there,
done that" element. And the PDUs are a real nice bonus.
Have a great
2014!"
-Alex
Martins, PMP
TaaS
Capability Lead
Hewlett-Packard
Company
ES
Global Testing Practice
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STPCon 2014
April 14-17
New Orleans, LA
The Software Test Professionals Conference Spring 2014
is a conference you won't want to miss. Each conference builds
upon its successes by taking into consideration the feedback from
past attendees. This means that you receive the educational
development you want most presented in the best learning environment
possible.
Attending this conference will help you meet your professional career
goals and give you the opportunity to improve your software testing
technique; find the latest tools; discover emerging trends; develop
new or improve existing processes; network and gather with other
high-level professionals; and gain industry insight you won't find
anywhere else.
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Green Tip
When
possible, find used products at your local thrift store, garage
sales, used bookstores, or online at sites like Ebay.com or
Craigslist.com. This helps cut down on the use of natural resources
for production of products, and by recycling old items you are
helping to reduce waste sent to the landfill.
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Complimentary Webinars
Earn
1.5 PDUs for select webinars. Attendance of the live webinar
is required to earn PDUs.
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ISTQB Certified Tester Virtual Boot Camps
April 21, 2014
11am to 5 pm CDT
July 30, 2014
11am to 5 pm CDT
October 2, 2014
11am to 5pm CDT
(based on materials accredited to
the 2012 syllabus)
March 14, 2014
11am to 5pm CDT
June 2, 2014
11am to 5pm CDT
September 8, 2014
11am to 5pm CDT
December 2, 2014
11am to 5pm CST
ISTQB Advanced Level
Test Analyst Boot Camp
(updated for 2012 syllabus)
US$ 599
May 2, 2014
11am to 5pm CDT
August 20, 2014
11am to 5pm CDT
November 12, 2014
11am to 5pm CST
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Non-Certification Virtual
Workshops
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Certification Public Courses
Test Engineering
Foundation Level
Earn 22.5 PDUs for this course
US$ 2,000
March 3-6, 2014
Seattle, Washington
March 31-April 3, 2014
Newark, New Jersey
April 7-10, 2014
New Orleans, Louisiana
May 5-8, 2014
Denver, Colorado
June 2-5, 2014
Las Vegas, Nevada
June 16-19, 2014
Kansas City, Missouri
Advanced Test Manager
(accredited to 2012 syllabus by ASTQB December 2012)
Earn
32.5 PDUs for this course
US$ 2,650
March 17-21
San Francisco, California
April 28-May 2, 2014
Tampa, Florida
May 5-9, 2014
San Antonio, Texas
June 16-20, 2014
Phoenix, Arizona
(accredited
to 2012 syllabus by ASTQB December 2012)
March 17-20, 2014
Phoenix, Arizona
May 19-22, 2014
McLean, Virginia
May 26-29, 2014
Toronto, Canada
Advanced Technical Test
Analyst
(accredited to 2012 syllabus by ASTQB January
2013)
US$ 2,250
March 19-21, 2014
San Francisco, California
April 1-3, 2014
McLean, Virginia
(an IREB, IIBA and IBAQB exam preparation course)
Earn 18 CDUs for this course
US$ 2,500
Contact RBCS
to schedule
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