Software Factories Feel Pull Towards Testing
With the calendar bearing down, customers may be insisting that Y2K companies selling factory-style find and fix services offer testing also. Several Y2K firms claim to be feeling this marketplace demand for expanded testing services. And that could be a pull of Titanic proportions.
Bruce Hall, Marketing Vice President at Trigent Software, Southborough, MA, says setting up a testbed is a******** five year activity*******. Hall says that less than two percent of firms have testbeds complete enough to test their systems fully. "There is no time to finish and many people have no clue where to start," he says. Normal maintenance introduces changes to one to two percent of programs, Hall claims, while Y2K hits 30 to 50 percent. "It's very traumatic," he says. "The decision to outsource `find and fix' has become a `no-brainer.' Now testing support, including project management, methodology, tools and staff augmentation, is being requested."
Is remediation the tip of the century iceberg? Perhaps so. Hall predicts massive failures because, even if its remediated, companies will not have the time to test. "The simple reality is that software must be tested in its host environment..if testing takes its historical route, companies test in the time that is left. A quick unit test may be all that time allows," Hall said.
While initially hoping to use internal people to write test scripts, companies are looking at their past track records in this area and turning outside for help, according to Hall. He says today that that could mean asking service companies to provide regression testing of unfixed as well as fixed code. The market, he says, is also moving to seek project management and methods support necessary to test systems in trans century mode.
Syntel CTO Ken Kenjale agrees that the market is moving in the testing direction. He said customers are asking his firm to create their test cases for them. According to Kenjale, no amount of Y2K testing is sufficient. "There are millions of combinations and permutations" which can cause errors, he says. "It doesn't take anything to run a tool," Kenjale claims. "You must understand its impact. That is a high risk area." Kenjale says test expertise is required to know what and where to test and what it means. Date names, for instance, are found in source code, JCL, screens, reports and files. Not only can errors be introduced by dates not found, but also by the fix itself. "It's easy to make changes," Kenjale says, "it's harder to have a good level of confidence that the changes have been done right."
Tactical Strategy Group President William Ulrich says that while factories may be offering certain types of test-related support, the difference is in the details. According to Ulrich, software factories may offer to test the dates in routines they've modified for the client. Theses firms cannot, however, test the code in its native environment. Like Hall, Ulrich says such testing must be conducted at the client site, with subject matter experts who understand the applications and data thoroughly. "A third party is likely to have little or no knowledge of the application," Ulrich says. As an example, he says that a hard-coded business date might be obsolete and completely meaningless to the operations of the enterprise. Without knowing its significance, the outside firm might trigger a test case to check for it anyway. Ulrich maintains that the test team, composed of those with test, application, system and business expertise, are best assembled and managed on-site. "Consultants can help, but they can't take on the responsibility or the liability [of testing]," Ulrich said. |
