As I started my first job, the company was approaching the end of its 9 month release cycle. Two days into my employment the entire company got together and the head of QA proclaimed: “We have put the product through rigorous testing, we have hit it from all angles for three weeks, we feel good about its quality, we are ready to sign off”. This was met with loud cheers - the product was ready to be released.
This statement - “we have put the product through rigorous testing, we feel good about its quality” - captures the approach to software testing that is prevalent in our industry. How many tests does it take for you to feel good about the quality of your software? How much time?
I don’t want to feel good about the quality of my software. I must know.
I work with teams whose release cycles are measured in hours or even minutes. On such teams, knowing with high confidence that product is ready to be released is essential. Testing, as we know it, doesn’t provide that. It is probabilistic at best. A deterministic approach to software certification is required.
Assertive Product Certification is an approach to software certification that allows teams to deterministically reach conclusions about readiness of their product for production release. This approach has been utilized by hundreds of teams in fully automated releases environments across the technology spectrum. Many of these teams operate some of the world’s largest software systems.
At a high level, the approach is straightforward: all expected behaviors of the product must be explicitly declared, then asserted every time the product is modified.
I wrote an article that goes into the details of Assertive Product Certification. The article covers the definition of the approach as well commons questions and situations. I finish with an example workflow of a team utilizing the techniques described in the article.
I am very much interested to hear your feedback. Please comment directly in the document or write to me via LinkedIn, Twitter, or Tumblr.
The full article is available here.
picture: (cc) Paolo Camera @flickr
