By James A. Whittaker



W. Edwards Deming helped to revolutionize the process of manufacturing automobiles in the 1970s and a decade later the software industry ran with the manufacturing analogy and the result was nearly every waterfall, spiral or agile method we have. Some like TQM, Cleanroom and Six Sigma are obvious descendants of Deming while others were just heavily influenced by his thinking. Deming was the man.



I repeat, was . My time testing in Google's data center makes it clear that this analogy just doesn't fit anymore. I want a new one. And I want one that helps me as a tester. I want one that better guides my behavior.



We just don't write or release software the way we used to. Software isn't so much built as it is grown . Software isn't shipped ... it's simply made available by, often literally, the flip of a switch. This is not your father's software. 21st century development is a seamless path from innovation to release where every phase of development, including release, is happening all the time. Users are on the inside of the firewall in that respect and feedback is constant. If a product isn't compelling we find out much earlier and it dies in the data center. I fancy these dead products serve to enrich the data center, a digital circle of life where new products are built on the bones of the ones that didn't make it.



In our father's software and Deming's model we talk about quality control and quality assurance while we play the role of inspector. In contrast, my job seems much more like that of an attending physician. In fact, a medical analogy gives us some interesting parallels to think about software testing. A physician's hospital is our data center, there is always activity and many things are happening in parallel. Physicians have patients; we have applications and features. Their medical devices are our infrastructure and tools. I can picture my application's features strewn across the data center in little virtual hospital beds. Over here is the GMail ward, over there is Maps. Search, of course, has a wing of its own and Ads, well, they all have private rooms.



In a hospital records are important. There are too many patients with specific medical conditions and treatment histories for any physician to keep straight. Imagine walking up to the operating table without examination notes and diagnoses? Imagine operating without a constant stream of real time health data?



Yet as software testers we find ourselves in this situation often. That app lying in our data center has been tested before. It has been treated before. Where are our medical notes?



So let's add little clipboards to the virtual data center beds in which our apps lay. Let's add equipment to take vitals and display them for any attending tester to see. Like human patients, apps have a pulse, data runs through code paths like blood through veins. There are important things happening, countable events that lead to statistics, indicators and create a medical history for an attending tester to use in whatever procedure they must now perform. The work of prior testers need not be ignored.



It's an unsettling aspect of the analogy that I have put developers in the role of creator, but so be it. Like other metaphorical creators before them they have spawned intrinsically flawed creatures. Security is their cancer, privacy their aging. Software is born broken and only some things can be fixed. The cancer of security can only be managed. Like actual aging, privacy is a guarantee only young software enjoys. Such is the life of a data center app.



But it is the monitors and clipboards that intrigue me. What do they say of our digital patients? As an app grows from concept into adolescence what part of their growth do we monitor? Where is the best place to place our probes? How do we document treatment and evaluations? Where do we store the notes about surgeries? What maladies have been treated? Are there problematic organs and recurrent illness? The documents and spreadsheets of the last century are inadequate. A patient's records are only useful if they are attached to the patient, up-to-date and in full living color to be read by whatever attending tester happens to be on call.



This is the challenge of the new century of software. It's not a process of get-it-as-reliable-as-possible-before-we-ship. It's health care, cradle to grave health care ... prevention, diagnosis, treatment and cure.



So slip into your scrubs, it's going to be a long night in the ER.