As I wrote in my last post, I have been studying and performing software testing lately. Gladly I have been fortunate to be chosen into the NetBeans IDE Community Acceptance Testing program (NetCAT) as now I can closely study how a bigger software product suite is tested and stabilized by very professionals from early beta to the final customer release.

The testing has already started even though beta isn’t even released. Currently reported issues are based on the daily and Q builds. Testing will gain it’s full speed early next week when the first beta is released. I’ll write a blog entry or two on the NetCAT experiences later.

As a side note regarding the testing methods: Nokia’s open source project team (Maemo) seems to be using interesting stabilizing event where all developers are gathered to sit at the same table before the software’s release date. I believe that this kind of an collaborative event will be quite efficient when the goal is to hunt the final bugs and issues.

It has been a few months since I bought a Java game for my Nokia 6670. Today I found out that they had made a mobile version of Leisure Suit Larry and I just had to download it for the old times sake (Can’t forget the Larry 1′s shaking black boxes :)). But what a disappointment it was as the game hang on the intro screen after the start. I hope that I get my few euros back as I gave some feedback to the game’s distributor. However I’m not surprised by this bug as I have also developed some games for J2ME and even only for single platform (Series 60) and still fought the differences between two devices that were supposed to run the same application in the same way. The current mobile game developers have to develope and test their games on hundreds of phones (atleast I hope they do). I can’t envy them.

This leads me to software testing: I have professionally become quite acquainted with the testing processes lately at the work as we are testing our long term software project as hard as we can. I have to say that testing ain’t that easy as it sounds to someone who hasn’t done it before. Because of this (quite painful) testing experience I’m definitely going to exploit Test Driven Development (TDD) methodology on my next projects (on both professional and personal) as it lightens the manual testing process and minimizes the project’s change requests in the later stages as bugs are already fixed in the early phases of the project. Ofcourse I am not going to apply TDD in it’s full strength right away but I’m certainly going to adapt to it more and more on the becoming months and years.

I would be more then happy to receive your comments and experiences on the software testing and the pain involved in it. As a closing words I would like give my respect to all you testers out there!