Test While You Sleep (and over Weekends)

Relax. I am not referring to offshore development centers, overtime on weekends, or working the night shift. Rather, I want to draw your attention to how much computing power we have at our disposal. Specifically, how much we are not harnessing to make our lives as programmers a little easier. Are you constantly finding it difficult to get enough computing power during the work day? If so, what are your test servers doing outside of normal work hours? More often than not, the test servers are idling overnight and over the weekend. You can use this to your advantage.

• Have you been guilty of committing a change without running all the tests? One of the main reasons programmers don't run test suites before committing code is because of the length of time they may take. When deadlines are looming and push comes to shove, humans naturally start cutting corners. One way to address this is to break down your large test suite into two or more profiles. A smaller, mandatory test profile that is quick to run, will help to ensure that tests are run before each commit. All of the test profiles (including the mandatory profile — just to be sure) can be automated to run overnight, ready to report their results in the morning.

• Have you had enough opportunity to test the stability of your product? Longer-running tests are vital for identifying memory leaks and other stability issues. They are seldom run during the day as it will tie up time and resources. You could automate a soak test to be run during the night, and a bit longer over the weekend. From 6.00 pm Friday to 6.00 am the following Monday there are 60 hours worth of potential testing time.

• Are you getting quality time on your Performance testing environment? I have seen teams bickering with each other to get time on the performance testing environment. In most cases neither team gets enough quality time during the day, while the environment is virtually idle after hours. The servers and the network are not as busy during the night or over the weekend. It's an ideal time to run some quality performance tests.

• Are there too many permutations to test manually? In many cases your product is targeted to run on a variety of platforms. For example, both 32-bit and 64-bit, on Linux, Solaris, and Windows, or simply on different versions of the same operating system. To make matters worse, many modern applications expose themselves to a plethora of transport mechanisms and protocols (HTTP, AMQP, SOAP, CORBA, etc.). Manually testing all of these permutations is very time consuming and most likely done close to a release due to resource pressure. Alas, it may be too late in the cycle to catch certain nasty bugs.

Automated tests run during the night or over weekends will ensure all these permutations are tested more often. With a little bit of thinking and some scripting knowledge, you can schedule a few cron jobs to kick off some testing at night and over the weekend. There are also many testing tools out there that could help. Some organizations even have server grids that pool servers across different departments and teams to ensure that resources are utilized efficiently. If this is available in your organization, you can submit tests to be run at night or over weekends.