[sf-lug] (Tech) Developers responsibility...Saga continues

[Sarah Mei]

There are lots of different types of testing, and who does what varies
by company, by contract, and by vertical industry.  But on small web
projects, I've mostly seen this breakdown:

Developer: unit and functional testing.  Unit testing ensures that all
methods/functions work as expected.  Functional testing tests "tasks"
within the application.  A task may span multiple methods/functions or
pages.  Adding something to a shopping cart is a task; checking out is
a task; successfully paying is a task.  Both unit and functional tests
can usually be automated.  Have a look at phpUnit or Apache-test
(http://shiflett.org/archive/80).

Customer: acceptance testing, also called integration testing.  This
is where the customer makes sure the application does everything s/he
wants it to.  It helps to have a list of what it's supposed to do,
hopefully in the contract.  Sign off generally happens after the
customer finishes this testing.

It sounds like what happened is the website owner hadn't done many
software projects before, and then got himself a bad php programmer
who didn't test sufficiently.  Because the owner didn't know that he
needed to do acceptance testing, the bad programming made it through
to sign-off.

Unfortunately, this happens a lot.  The upside is that for good
programmers, there's money to be made cleaning up the messes.

Sarah


On 6/21/06, vincent polite <vpolitewebsiteguy at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> As I wrote earlier, I've been helping this guy out with his website. I'd
> never done q&a on a whole site. Just the page I was working on. While trying
> to figure something out, I noticed that the space to enter the credit card
> number was to small. Max characters was set at 14. Most credit cards are 16.
> The project was supposedly signed off on. But, if the site would not work
> right to begin with, wouldn't that invalidate the "signing off"? Shouldn't
> the developer do all the testing and not the client hire someone. As I say,
> I don't know all that has transpired on this project. Still trying to figure
> these things out. Thanks