Comments on: Web 2.0 needs testing

By: shalabh sharma

shalabh sharma — Wed, 30 May 2007 12:43:09 +0000

We develop and test Web 2.0 applications and generally cater to retail market. What I feel is knowing your application is very important and Flicker with a 30 minutes release cycle are not coming up with earth shattering changes, hence no need for end to end testing. They probably understand their application and have a fair bit of idea about the impact areas of changes for every release. Hence they focus their QA efforts on the impact areas and have been able to deliver well so far.
In future they may grow into a complex application where testing maually may not be such a lucrative option and may opt for Automated testing. But till then none of us can complain as Flickr is doing it right and I see none of the users including me complaining.

By: Tom Croucher

Tom Croucher — Sun, 18 Dec 2005 14:00:45 +0000

I have to admit this is a rather excellent coincidence. I found this article after searching for Web 2.0 testing after going to Thomas Fuch’s workshop also run by Carson Workshops. Thomas is keen on testing, his library has lots of unit tests. However, he just couldn’t suggest how to integrate testing into a web 2.0 application. As we all know browser differences make up a large part of web application bug issues (at least at the front end). As such it seems strange to methat these two big players in Web 2.0 don’t have, or haven’t emphasised the need for end to end repeatable tests.

By: Sam Newman

Sam Newman — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 09:15:03 +0000

It actually occured to me after I wrote this that what I might of done is give a good argument _against_ the need for automated testing. “See? Flickr is successful, and they do need automated functional tests!”. Of course as “Carlos mentioned(Why doesn’t Flickr do automated tests?)”:http://www.lixo.org/archives/2005/10/18/why-doesnt-flickr-do-automated-tests/ it is probably the case that the Flickr guys worked out where to spend their time and money and automated testing wasn’t it.

It will be interesting to see if as they grow they consider them important or not. As many of us have seen, the costs of not having a comprehensive automated test suite gets greater over time (as more functionality is added). As Flickr matures, they may find themselves with longer time betweeen releases if they still trly on performing most of their QA function manually.

By: Jason Yip

Jason Yip — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 06:46:50 +0000

I’ve never heard of anyone complaining about Flickr’s bugginess… This doesn’t mean that bugs aren’t there, but the count and severity is low enough that people are still considering the overall experience superior. There’s also changing expectations by labeling your product BETA.

By: ade

ade — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 05:04:40 +0000

This raises a particularly ugly question: are they deploying every half an hour because the only way they have to test things is to push it out to the public?

Are those multiple deployments really delivering value/new functionality or are they caught in the fire-fighting cycle of: release -> discover bug -> release again?

By: Jason Yip

Jason Yip — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 03:40:36 +0000

FIT and FITnesse weren’t written specifically for testing web applications though Selenium and Watir (which I prefer) were. It’s hard to fault Flickr given how often they are actually able to deploy (once every half hour) though I think they are able to exploit the relatively low sophistication and criticality of their application. Of course, I’m still thinking that with automated tests and OO, they’d be even more capable.