Several times recently I've been asked how much and how well we test our product. Our board wants to make sure that we're building a quality product that won't result in first-customer black-eyes. Professional indemnity insurers want to make sure that action is unlikely to be taken as a result of a bug. Potential partners and customers want to make sure that a first-generation product isn't going to be completely ridden with bugs.
Sure, I can talk about how test-infected we are, and how seriously we take quality development. That goes some distance.
But OpenGamma doesn't have a dedicated QA department. And yet I know that the quality of our source code is exceptionally high. How do I convey this as quickly as possible?
I've found a technique that works pretty darn well.
Bamboo+Clover To The Rescue
All I really have to do is open a web browser and go to our Bamboo server, where I can show a screen that shows the sheer number of build, test, and Clover-coverage build plans we have, and show that they're running all the time. That gets over the "are you guys actually testing" barrier.
For those of you trying to keep track, that's only one laptop-screen-full of many. Don't try to extrapolate the number of projects/plans we have from that. :-)
But how good are those tests? That's where Clover comes in.
Pictures like this go a really long way to putting their minds at ease:
Yes, I know that just because you're executing lines of code it doesn't mean that the tests are actually checking the results and all that jazz. But as a first-cut sign of "we take testing seriously" graphs like that pretty much immediately end the coversation.
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