September 11, 2013

Mid-Week with SFDIPOT

Its been two days of my renewed attempt of learning SFDIPOT by using it for all of my testing activities.  So far I have used it in conjunction with a product tour, a bug verification/investigation, and a the test coverage planning for a single feature. I've been surprised to find that it helped for all three.  The bug investigation was the one that surprised me. I thought I might have to heavily modify SFDIPOT to use it, but it has started to flow nicely and more comfortably. Here's some quick thoughts. from the early week.


Understanding a technique takes time, and often trying to explain it to others. I think I learned the most from about SFDIPOT writing monday's blog post.  Michael Bolton and James Bach were both generous with their time and knowledge and review my post before it went live and discussed with me some the place where I wasn't truly relaying what they meant. There are still a few places in my post they are not completely what they mean, but they are in areas where I'm still not sure what they mean.

There's never too small a item to use this technique if it is stumping you. Yesterday I had a bug report come in from the field. The replication steps were simple, except they didn't expose the bug except at the customer site.  After spending some time trying to figure out what the difference was I pulled out SFDIPOT and took the time to do a structured approach to my thinking about my investigation. Very quickly I identified the missing variable and was able to get refined replication steps that reliably reproduced the bug.

The last thing this exercise has shown me is the the structured approach helps me even when I'm working with a old existing feature that I've tested many times.  Today I was able to quickly identify a place where testability could be improved while i was doing a code review and using SFDIPOT to guide my thoughts. I haven't even thought of the test coverage yet, but I already know it will be easier to test because I was able to fully think about the feature.

It's going well so far, I've even had some developers asking about it! I'll be back on friday with the round up!

1 comment:

  1. Nice, interesting to read about how you've put it to use and I liked the example of how you put it to use with the bug.

    Seems to be a common blog topic, I did one myself a while ago, this post is a good reminder for me to revisit my usage of it as I can see other ways it can be put to use. Thanks!!

    http://spin.atomicobject.com/2012/08/30/getting-testing-up-to-speed-using-sf-depot/

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