Dont Put Up With Costly Software Bugs

A variety of automated testing tools are also available. Many are open-source, which means you can get them for little or no cost.

Whatever the mechanism, a great deal of time and effort is saved. Automated testing is most effective when integrated with the software build cycle.

Change management.

Youve moved testing up in the cycle and automated it wherever possible. The next step is to manage it. For thats theres a proven and widely accepted technique called continuous integration (CI).

CI allows developers to increase the reliability of their work. With CI, development, integration and testing are done continuously (in contrast to testing that is done daily, weekly, monthly, or not until the end of a project). The result is the ability to catch most bugs before they slip through to production.

CI is essentially a continuous workflow where every change or addition of software code results in a rebuild, retest and redeployment of the system. It can be used at project and enterprise levels. The key benefit is that CI produces better quality code and eliminates time spent chasing down bugs where one persons work has stepped on someone elses without either person realizing it. Thats important. Pesky bugs are often born out of the interaction between two or more pieces of work.

Bugs created by interaction between multiple developers tend to be exacerbated by time. Thats because bugs can be inserted weeks or months before they first manifest themselves. With CI, however, bugs manifest themselves at the time theyre introduced and can be detected and tracked much more easily.

The key to CI is to automate. And an automated CI process doesnt mean exorbitant costs, thanks to a variety of tools on the market (some of which are open-source). These tools automate the build process and integrate automated test suites. Software builds run every time a developer checks in code. Additionally, the full range of needed tests is executed automatically each time a build successfully completes. That means the process can be repeated a dozen or more times a day. Knowing the status of code at all times also allows the testing team to focus its efforts.

Suppose you wanted to update a policy system, which dictates the need to change 20 different products. The typical approach is to update each product one at a time and then manually test each before putting it into production.

Sounds good, right?

Sure, except this approach doesnt allow for testing all of the previous products. In other words, testing stops short, and thats not good when products come from the same code base (which is almost always the case).

People truncate the testing process because they believe its too time-consuming and costly. The theory is that it takes too much work to manually re-test Product A to determine whether it works flawlessly when changes to Product B are made, and to test Products A and B to determine whether they still work when changes are made to Product C, and so on.

However, thorough testing and re-testing can be done at a fraction of the cost by using a combination of CI and automated testing. The reason is that it minimizes time spent writing initial test cases. Automated testing takes care of the rest. It also eliminates the need to look for bugs in all 20 products should an error be found upon system deployment.

By testing early in the software development cycle, automating where possible, and implementing practices like CI and test-first development, carriers can drastically reduce the high costs of tracking and fixing bugs. They can also consistently deploy dependable, high-value IT systems.

And remember, these practices are proven effective. Theyre also relatively easy and inexpensive to introduce into an organization. We recommend experimenting with one or more of these on a project of manageable size. Youll be glad you did.

Bob Hunter is director of insurance and financial services practice, and Tom Boscher is a project manager for ThoughtWorks based in Chicago.

Reproduced from National Underwriter Edition, May 12, 2003. Copyright 2003 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved. Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.