Linda G. Hayes

If you aren’t dealing with end-to-end testing now, you will be soon. As software developers assemble systems from components and integrate those systems across platforms and even other companies, they are becoming increasingly aware that traditional, application-centric testing no longer suffices. The boundaries between applications are blurring, and changing components at any level can have […]

Knowing what systems to test is hard enough. But with many systems, you can’t even get started until you have enough test data to make it meaningful. And if you need thousands or millions of data records, you’ve got a whole new problem. For most large-scale commercial applications, assembling the test data is most of […]

A watershed event for the testing industry occurred in December 1999, and I’m not talking about Y2K. For the first time–that I am aware of, anyway–the sorry state of test practices was openly discussed in a national forum. The cover story of a mainstream newspaper was actually focused on the commonplace failure of computer systems […]

One of the biggest trends in software lately is the shift toward application service providers (ASPs)–vendors that deliver their applications over the Internet. That is, instead of investing in the infrastructure of software needed to run a system–servers, databases, networks, and so forth–customers simply pay a fee to access the same software over the Internet. […]

See if this scenario sounds familiar: Your company–or one that you know of–has bought into the admittedly alluring idea that you can purchase commercial enterprise resource planning (ERP) software that integrates the entire enterprise. This concept will allow you to use sexy new Web or client/server technology that replaces all of your ugly, homegrown mainframe […]

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, where does quality fit in? There are undoubtedly aspects of quality in how an application appears and behaves, but what about what you don’t see? What about the quality of construction? Software applications may be appealing and powerful on the outside but overly complex and fragile […]

What do you do when you’re charged with implementing a test strategy to assure the quality and availability of a very large, very complex Web site? You turn to automation, of course, just like Richard Lacroix of The Manufacturers Life Insurance Company (Manulife Financial) did. By adopting one of a new class of stress-testing tools […]

In my April 1999 column, ” The pain of platform possibilities,” I discussed the impossibility of testing all the conceivable combinations of supported platforms. I also introduced the concept of certified vs. supported platforms as a strategy for identifying what can reasonably be tested internally and what should be supplemented with beta programs or risk […]

Metrics are trendy, and rightfully so: You can’t manage what you can’t measure. The problem is, almost all of us have slaved over collecting, formatting, and presenting vast storehouses of information that no one ever reads or comprehends, let alone acts upon. In our zeal to educate management about what we are doing, we end […]

While component-based architectures allow software developers to create applications that support many different databases, servers, and operating environments, they create a quality quagmire of nightmarish proportions for software testers. “You mean to tell me you aren’t even going to test the server platform that is used by the customer who signed our largest deal last […]