Software testing process improvements

摘要

Software process improvement has become a popular pastime, for a variety of reasons. The Software Engineering Institute's summary of experimental data, which resulted in the Capability Maturity Model, has now had considerable corroboration. There are nearly as many software processes as there are combinations of developers, users, and products. Similarly, there are probably as many software process improvement approaches. However, the meta-process for performing process improvement is quite straightforward. Processes can be represented by a small number of abstractions, with variety supplied through implementation details. The scheme for improvement is almost self-evident: figure out where you are now, use a software process maturity guide to identify shortcomings, plot a change in a direction to eliminate a shortcoming, and go for it. This paper won't dwell on the meta process and its enactment; the authors simply assume one is in place. Rather, they consider some ways to improve the testing aspects of your software process. These may be changes in what you do for testing as well as in how you do it.