Nadler & Associates
Testing and Testability Training

Overview

Software projects are often late, over-budget, and/or produce results of unacceptable quality. Software maintenance often introduces bugs while implementing fixes. A frequent cause of these problems is doing testing after development. In this training class, development managers and developers learn how to integrate testing into development and save time, reduce costs, improve productivity, generally improve the work environment, and without a struggle.

The cost to fix a bug increases exponentially as the distance from coding to fix increases. By reducing this distance, integrating testing tightly into development saves time and makes life easier. Yet ask a development manager or developer about test-driven development/design or using test tools during development, and you'll often hear "it's too expensive", "we don't have time for that", or "it takes too long". This training drives home the high costs of deferred testing, and how to reduce time and cost to market with integrated testing.

In a highly interactive Socratic discussion, participants review real-world projects in trouble, drawn from Dave Nadler's long consulting career. Participants are asked to explain what is going wrong and suggest how to improve things. After group discussion of each example, the remediation implemented and resulting improvements are discussed. The lessons we can learn are timeless, valuable, and quite entertaining !

Participants will take away a solid understanding of techniques they can use to improve their development productivity. Specific techniques discussed include unit tests, record-playback techniques, integrating tests into builds, QA department coordination, and environment simulation (all with examples).

Intended Audience

Development managers and senior developers, testers, advanced CS students with some commercial development experience.

Duration

Typically 3 – 4 hours. Also available as a one-week workshop starting with background training, and working through team planning of specific techniques to implement in your organization.

Customization, Consulting

This can be a generic class, or tailored with examples most appropriate for a specific audience. The class has been used very successfully to change the perceptions and direction of large teams (including international and distributed teams), after an improved technical approach has been established during consulting with development management. To speed transition to a more effective development process, the class can be coupled with consulting on development and test methodology and implementation.

Embedded Systems Conference Course

Dave Nadler taught this seminar on improving software development through integrated testing,
at the April-2013 Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose.
Click here for Conference Proceedings Paper.