Professor Janzen Provides Some Insight to LogiGear Magazine on How to Become a Software Tester

David S. Janzen – Associate Professor of Computer Science Department California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo – homepage

LogiGear: How did you get into software testing and what do you find interesting about it?

Professor Janzen: The thing I enjoy most about computing is creating something that helps people. Since my first real job building telecommunications fraud detection systems, requirements and design were the most fun. Then when I heard about this thing called test-driven development, and something just clicked. Using unit test specification to do design made sense to me — plus, you get this great side effect of all these automated tests to make refactoring and maintenance easier. I guess I got pulled into software testing by way of software design.

LogiGear: What kind of work are you doing and how did you pick those specific testing topics?

Professor Janzen: My PhD research focused on how test-driven development (TDD) affects the internal, or design quality of software. I did a bunch of experiments with students and software professionals that provided some evidence about the benefits of TDD. The experiments are pretty straightforward:

Get two groups of essentially equivalent programmers, ask them to complete the same tasks, but have one group use the approach you are studying while the other uses the “traditional” approach. Then collect metrics and surveys to see how the two approaches varied.

Having become convinced that TDD is a great way to design and build software, my recent efforts have moved toward incorporating TDD into computing education.

I think TDD is taking the same path that objects took in the early ’90s. Folks in the industry started adopting objects so the broader academic community took notice. However, they mostly considered object-oriented programming to be an advanced concept, so it started to appear in graduate and upper-level courses. As educators became more comfortable with the approach, objects eventually made it down to first-year courses. I think the same is happening with TDD, so I am building tools and doing experiments to demonstrate that TDD can be taught to beginning programmers with great success. I call the approach Test-Driven Learning (TDL).

My current project is a web-based development environment for beginning programmers that will incorporate TDL-inspired labs. It will soon be available at http://web-ide.org.

LogiGear: How can a college student prepare to go into software testing and become really good at it and what should he or she look for in teachers, courses, and methods?

Professor Janzen: Software testing is such a great field to study. My students who are good at software testing often get the best job offers. Most undergraduate computer science and software engineering programs don’t have separate courses in software testing. The best route is to do well in your core programming courses, and then take as many software engineering courses as you can. Many software engineering courses involve team projects. Volunteer to be a software tester or quality assurance manager. Or, take the role of system integrator or build manager.

These roles will give you exposure to many of the automation tools that software testers use, and will help you start thinking about how to break software and not just how to build it.

LogiGear: What sort of graduate programs should college graduates consider? Also, in your opinion, what are some of the more interesting research questions people are asking now and what do you think they’ll be researching in 5 years?

Professor Janzen: There are two routes you might consider in graduate school. If you want to be involved in software development in companies and lead software teams, look at masters in software engineering programs. Many of these programs cater to software professionals who are already working in industry, by offering courses in the evenings or on weekends. If you are interested in more cutting-edge research, such as building new software testing tools, or developing new software testing methods, consider going to a traditional Computer Science PhD program. There are lots of smart researchers working on really interesting testing topics.

In five years? Well a lot of work seems to be focused on automatically generating automated tests, and also on tools for working with models. Look for some of the top software testing conferences and try to attend. Read software testing trade journals — there are plenty online, and many are still published in magazine format. Try to identify and follow interesting and cutting edge active researchers – and maybe if you’re lucky you’ll get a chance to meet these pioneers in person, which can be an exciting and thought provoking experience.

LogiGear: Lastly, who do you consider to be some of the leaders in this field and what are they doing in the field of software testing and development?

Professor Janzen: I am interested in some of the work being completed by Tao Xie and Laurie Williams at North Carolina State University. Tao is doing a lot of work with automated software testing and data mining. Laurie has working on static analysis tools, reliability, security, and mutation testing.

LogiGear: Thank you, Professor Janzen.

 

LogiGear Corporation

LogiGear Corporation provides global solutions for software testing, and offers public and corporate software-testing training programs worldwide through LogiGear University. LogiGear is a leader in the integration of test automation, offshore resources and US project management for fast and cost-effective results. Since 1994, LogiGear has worked with hundreds of companies from the Fortune 500 to early-stage startups, creating unique solutions to exactly meet their needs. With facilities in the US and Vietnam, LogiGear helps companies double their test coverage and improve software quality while reducing testing time and cutting costs.

For more information, contact Joe Hughes + 01 650.572.1400

LogiGear Corporation
LogiGear Corporation provides global solutions for software testing, and offers public and corporate software testing training programs worldwide through LogiGear University. LogiGear is a leader in the integration of test automation, offshore resources and US project management for fast, cost-effective results. Since 1994, LogiGear has worked with Fortune 500 companies to early-stage start-ups in, creating unique solutions to meet their clients’ needs. With facilities in the US and Viet Nam, LogiGear helps companies double their test coverage and improve software quality while reducing testing time and cutting costs.

The Related Post

Test design is the single biggest contributor to success in software testing. Not only can good test design result in good coverage, it is also a major contributor to efficiency. The principle of test design should be “lean and mean.” The tests should be of a manageable size and at the same time complete and ...
It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a software defect of epic proportions.
March Issue 2019: Leading the Charge with Better Test Methods
This article was originally featured in the May/June 2009 issue of Better Software magazine. Read the entire issue or become a subscriber. In my travels, I’ve worked with a number of companies that have attempted to assess the quality of their testing — or worse, their testers — using poorly considered metrics. Sometimes the measurement ...
At VISTACON 2011, Harry sat down with LogiGear Sr. VP, Michael Hackett, to discuss various training methodologies. Harry Robinson Harry Robinson is a Principal Software Design Engineer in Test (SDET) for Microsoft’s Bing team, with over twenty years of software development and testing experience at AT&T Bell Labs, HP, Microsoft, and Google, as well as ...
Last week I went to StarWest as a presenter and as a track chair to introduce speakers. Being a track chair is wonderful because you get to interface more closely with other speakers. Anyway…one of the speakers I introduced was Jon Bach. Jon is a good public speaker, and I was pleasantly surprised that he ...
“Combinatorial testing can detect hard-to-find software faults more efficiently than manual test case selection methods.” Developers of large data-intensive software often notice an interesting—though not surprising—phenomenon: When usage of an application jumps dramatically, components that have operated for months without trouble suddenly develop previously undetected errors. For example, newly added customers may have account records ...
Introduction Software Testing 3.0 is a strategic end-to-end framework for change based upon a strategy to drive testing activities, tool selection, and people development that finally delivers on the promise of software testing. For more details on the evolution of software testing and Software Testing 3.0 see: Software Testing 3.0: Delivering on the Promise of ...
LogiGear Magazine – February 2014 – Test Methods and Strategies
Internet-based per-use service models are turning things upside down in the software development industry, prompting rapid expansion in the development of some products and measurable reduction in others. (Gartner, August 2008) This global transition toward computing “in the Cloud” introduces a whole new level of challenge when it comes to software testing.
Introduction Many companies have come to realize that software testing is much more than a task that happens at the end of a software development cycle. They have come to understand that software testing is a strategic imperative and a discipline that can have a substantial impact on the success of an organization that develops ...
This article was developed from concepts in the book Global Software Test Automation: Discussion of Software Testing for Executives. Introduction Metrics are the means by which the software quality can be measured; they give you confidence in the product. You may consider these product management indicators, which can be either quantitative or qualitative. They are ...

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

Stay in the loop with the lastest
software testing news

Subscribe