How Google Tests Software [Paperback] Author: James A. Whittaker | Language: English | ISBN:
0321803027 | Format: PDF, EPUB
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2012 Jolt Award finalist!
Pioneering the Future of Software Test
Do you need to get it right, too? Then, learn from Google. Legendary testing expert James Whittaker, until recently a Google testing leader, and two top Google experts reveal exactly how Google tests software, offering brand-new best practices you can use even if you’re not quite Google’s size…yet!
Breakthrough Techniques You Can Actually Use
Discover 100% practical, amazingly scalable techniques for analyzing risk and planning tests…thinking like real users…implementing exploratory, black box, white box, and acceptance testing…getting usable feedback…tracking issues…choosing and creating tools…testing “Docs & Mocks,” interfaces, classes, modules, libraries, binaries, services, and infrastructure…reviewing code and refactoring…using test hooks, presubmit scripts, queues, continuous builds, and more. With these techniques, you can transform testing from a bottleneck into an accelerator–and make your whole organization more productive!
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- Paperback: 320 pages
- Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional; 1 edition (April 2, 2012)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0321803027
- ISBN-13: 978-0321803023
- Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.9 x 0.7 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
When I found out about the book "How Google Tests Software", it didn't take long until I had ordered a copy. I find it quite fascinating to read about how Google does things, whether it is about their development process, their infrastructure, their hiring process, or, in this case, how they test their software. I am a developer at heart, but I have worked for a few years as a tester, so testing is also dear to me.
It's quite an interesting book, and it makes some great points about the future of testing. However, despite the phrase "Help me test like Google" on the cover, it is not as useful as I had hoped when it comes to improving your own testing.The book starts off by describing the key roles at Google: SWE (Software Engineer), SET (Software Engineer in Test) and TE (Test Engineer). Briefly, the SWE builds features for Google's products, the SET develops testing infrastructure and larger-scale automatic tests, and the TE tests the products from a user's perspective. After the introductory chapter, there is a chapter each on the SET and TE roles, and there is also a chapter on the TEM (Test Engineer Manager) role. The final chapter is about the future of testing at Google (and in general).
Software Engineer in Test (SET)
As the different roles are explained in the respective chapters, there is also quite a bit of detail on how the testing is done at Google. The most interesting part in the chapter on the SET role is the part about the infrastructure. There is (of course) extensive support for running tests automatically. There is common infrastructure for compilation, execution, analysis, storage and results reporting of tests. Tests are categorized as small, medium, large or enormous.
The main contribution of this book, besides being an excellent read for anyone who considers working at Google, is the proclamation of how seriously software quality should be taken. Paradoxically, the book is technically complex, and yet those who should really read this book are managers - who often have a factory view of software development and fail to understand that high quality costs less. This is such an important lesson that needs to be learned by the software industry, that the effort of any author to demonstrate this point must be lauded.
Unfortunately, the book has two main drawbacks: one is that it is so specific, that it is unlikely to be of much help to other companies. The testing framework Google has built is extraordinary, but it is not a framework that can be easily reused in other contexts: it is highly web-oriented, and it leverages Google's distributed infrastructure.
The other is that the book is highly romanticized. It almost reads like a romance, and SETs are the heros. On one page, it is described how a developer can launch hundreds of tests and get coverage reports with a one-line command, a hallmark of efficiency - but on another page, a code sample using the testing framework is presented and it consists of 90% boilerplate code. The book is riddled with confrontations between the idealistic reality the authors describe and how that vision falls short of reality, be it in code samples or interviews with Googlers. Also, SETs are presented as superhumans - in the section where the hiring requirements for a SET are listed, one learns that in order to be a SET at Google, one needs to be a genius. Not a Google-employee level of genius, but an Einstein-who-can-also-read-other-people's-minds level of genius.
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