A new approach to software testing

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This week on Federal Tech Talk, host John Gilroy interviewed John Phillips, vice president, Public Sector at Tricentis.

Before being deployed, every software project must include testing. Traditionally, testing was done at the end of a long and tedious waterfall project. The testing would, inevitably, lead to problems and the entire project would have to be rewritten in many places. That process doesn’t seem like much until you understand that many large projects could take years to complete.

One antidote to this waterfall process is agile software development where small “bite-sized” chunks of code are released and altered to adapt to rapidly changing conditions. Manual testing is included in these small segments.

Federal systems are under constant attack and must comply with a myriad of cybersecurity regulations, which must be tested. Further, systems today can incorporate dozens of apps and each app must be patched regularly for security purposes. Unfortunately, this testing phase can be extremely time-consuming and expensive.

Phillips suggests that automating the testing process will bring large projects to completion sooner and save money in the process. During the interview, he referred to a project at a federal agency where automating testing saved millions of dollars.

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