Tom Breur
27 September 2015
I happen to like testing.
Sure, it can be tedious. It can be frustrating. And often it may seem
unnecessary. Especially when all goes well. For me, personally, somehow I get
great satisfaction knowing I created something (or am about to deliver
something) that makes me proud. Part of the enjoyment comes because I have verified that it works.
What is it about being in
a hurry that seduces us (me, too, don’t get me wrong!) to skim on testing? How
does time pressure (real or perceived) make us loose perspective on whether we
should test something, or not? You have all heard the reasoning: “it’ll
probably be allright”, “last time it worked”, “we probably won’t need that
feature, anyway”, and the whopper: “It’s such a small change, what could possibly go wrong?”
After the “Flash crash” on May 6,
2010 at 2:45, it became clear that “innocent” stub quotes that were “just” in
there, but weren’t going to be used anyway (!), had played a key role in
spiraling the robots of High Frequency Traders out of control. These stub
quotes had been set to arbitrarily low values (so as not to “interrupt” the
software during testing, btw), because
they weren’t needed anyway. Oops. That turned out to be an expensive error,
$ 1 Trillion market value. That will remain a very difficult world record to
beat…
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