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Jimmy Bogard » A sign of team maturity

A sign of team maturity


You know you have a mature team when, nine months into a project, your testing stats are:

  • 2384 unit tests
  • 606 integration tests
  • 205 UI/acceptance tests

And no one is asking to throw a party.  In past teams, we would mark milestones, “500 tests, hooray!!”.  With my current team, quality is not a goal, it’s a requirement for success.  These stats tell us that we’re merely fulfilling expectations, of both our management and ourselves.  A bar set high is a good thing.

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Posted Apr 09 2009, 08:56 AM by bogardj
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Comments

Jeremy Gray wrote re: A sign of team maturity
on 04-09-2009 1:30 PM

Out of curiosity, what size/disposition of team are these stats from?

bogardj wrote re: A sign of team maturity
on 04-09-2009 3:12 PM

@Jeremy

Around 6-7 developers, all senior level.

Jeremy Gray wrote re: A sign of team maturity
on 04-09-2009 3:56 PM

Thanks, Jimmy, the context is definitely helpful.

Lee Brandt wrote re: A sign of team maturity
on 04-09-2009 5:58 PM

Jealous, jealous, jealous.... MAN! I'm jealous.... way to go man

Cohen wrote re: A sign of team maturity
on 04-09-2009 7:00 PM

Very nice...

are there any nBehave scenario's in there?

chadmyers wrote re: A sign of team maturity
on 04-09-2009 7:06 PM

ONLY 2,384 tests?  Back in my day, we had 2,000 tests on the FIRST DAY and that was coding uphill, both ways in the snow.

We had black and amber 8" CRT monitors and stored our tests on 8 1/2" floppy disks!

peiklk wrote re: A sign of team maturity
on 04-09-2009 11:38 PM

This is only a sign of maturity if you've bought into TDD.  A quality product is the sign of maturity, not the method that got you there.

bogardj wrote re: A sign of team maturity
on 04-10-2009 7:36 AM

@chadmyers

And you only coded with your thumbs too, right?

@Cohen

Ahhhh....none.  We're using Gallio for our acceptance/UI tests.  It allows for parallel execution + test steps for readable reports.

bogardj wrote re: A sign of team maturity
on 04-10-2009 8:33 AM

@peiklk

Sorry, think I miscommunicated there.  The sign of maturity was not the # of tests, but rather no one felt the need to celebrate a certain milestone.

Tim Barcz wrote re: A sign of team maturity
on 04-14-2009 5:02 PM

This is cool....some questions:

What coverage does 2384 unit tests represent and what kind of freedom does it give you?

Are you integration tests automated?  If so, when do they run?  If not, when do you run them?

Howare you doing UI/acceptance tests?  Manual? Automated (WatiN/WatiR/etc? Mix?

bogardj wrote re: A sign of team maturity
on 04-14-2009 11:32 PM

@Tim

What coverage does 2384 unit tests represent and what kind of freedom does it give you?

No idea the coverage.  Something like 95-99% on our core domain, maybe 80% on the rest?  As far as freedom goes, we have a lot of confidence that we won't break anything, but we're looking at adding more integration tests (slow, higher-level) that enable bigger refactorings where we're not afraid to throw away tests.

Are you integration tests automated?  If so, when do they run?  If not, when do you run them?

Yes, all the time, locally and on the server.

Howare you doing UI/acceptance tests?  Manual? Automated (WatiN/WatiR/etc? Mix?

WatiN, w/ gallio, automated in a cascaded build.  A report is generated that the QA guys care about from the results.  Devs write the tests, with some fluenty domain-specific interface on top of WatiN.

JJ wrote re: A sign of team maturity
on 04-18-2009 9:45 AM

I would like to know how an integration test and how a UI/accpetance test typically looks like in your team? How do you setup, cleanup those tests? Do you use mocks or stubs for those tests? What's the execution time of your testsuite?

Could you post something about that?

Fen wrote re: A sign of team maturity
on 04-22-2009 4:35 AM

"And no one is asking to throw a party.  In past teams, we would mark milestones, “500 tests, hooray!!"

Erm, thats exactly what you are doing writing posts like this!

bogardj wrote re: A sign of team maturity
on 04-22-2009 8:33 AM

@Fen

Nah, I'm celebrating that we don't celebrate. TOTALLY different :)

Jimmy Bogard wrote A testing survey on a large project
on 05-05-2009 11:49 PM

Awhile back, I found that a mature team doesn’t celebrate test number milestones any more.  I just

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