During Iteration 1 of a project run for a big German Publisher, Tina (Project Manager) introduced a new way of testing to our project.
What she did for the first time was near-time testing.
In all projects before, we always used to have the software tested by the developers during the development process as well as the project manager right bevore the delivery to the customer.
The experience Tina made with the near time testing was very interesting. Once a developer reported to her that he finished a functionality (via Trac), she was instantly looking at the application and started testing the functionality with extreme and unexpected values.
The result of the testing can be summarized as follows:
» Developers had a faster feedback and therefore less context switches
» The Quality of the feedback was really high, due to Tinas knowledge about the customers expectations
» Tina was able to improve the application by using it constantly and making it therefore much better usable by the customer then it was planned on the contractual paper
» the only odd thing was that during this time (2 weeks) we had about 200 tix at all, which (when coming in constantly) are not very motivating to the developers
So as a final conclusion, we saw that near-time testing adds a lot of speed and value to the project, though it creates some additionally felt stress for our developers based on constantly incoming tickets.
[Update]: Just as a note: the customer filed 4 tickets while testing the app. We never had a better feedback before…
This entry was posted on Thursday, July 17th, 2008 at 10:18 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
finally someone else implements this wonderful technique – congratulations 
[...] During the past few month we pushed all of our projects on with near time testing. As already mentioned, I phased in this method since a project in july and after working the 1st time with tis method, we noticed following pros and cons of near time testing: [...]