Today is the future. [echo, jetsons sounds or future sounding music] The world has been marching forward but still there are no flying cars. [whawha wha..] Well, there are flying cars but none mass produced. Why not? Are We developers and we managers part of the reason why we still don’t have such nice things? Is the low quality track record of IT to blame? Must we be used getting patches, and upon installation, hoping this new version doesn’t make things worse?
Recall the pyramid generally has three floors: the penthouse filled with UI macro tests, the middle is inhabited by subcutaneous macro tests, and the ground floor–a plethora of micro tests. The goal of CI is to give valuable feedback to a team as fast as possible.
At this point, I hope you got the ideas of why overdoing the upper floors of the pyramid will cause it to tumble. In the previous episode I mentioned you can get a test pyramid worksheet. This worksheet can be used to plan out how to build your project’s mighty pyramid of test.
Sphinx, a mythological creature with the head of a man and the body of a lion, loves to ask questions and demands answers. If you don’t answer the questions correctly, the Sphinx eats you. In IT, the closest to a Sphinx are QA or Release managers, who although may not eat you, will ask questions in order to decide if your product is in good shape.
Teams have found that just because acceptance criteria COULD be made into hard to maintain and unreliable UI test, many of them actually don’t need to be executed via the UI but instead in some sub layer beneath.
