Speaker presentation: Vemund Østgaard

By Jørgen Austvik and Tor Stålhane

Vemund started to work with testing in 1999 at Clustra – a local database company that was later acquired by Sun Microsystems. After a couple of months in support, Vemund wanted to move into testing. His first assignment was testing database backup and restore, and when he discovered that only one out-of three of the restores were consistent, he decided that testing was a good field to work in and he has stayed there ever since.

Based on experience from conferences and from the company where he is working, Vemund finds that one of the most important changes for the field of testing and QA over these last ten years is that the field has received an increasing attention. The field has gotten an increase in reputation as a profession, and is incorporated into the software development processes at an earlier stage. At Sun Microsystems, Vemund experienced a big change when a new director arrived and a project in crises initiated the changes that made developers and testers work more closely together, and beginning to see each others as equals.

At the Free Test conference Vemund will present the Java Engine for Testing (JET, http://kenai.com/projects/jet), which was started as a project to enable testing resources to build new tests instead of just running and maintaining the existing test suite. In addition, the tool enables the tester to reproduce tests so that they are consistent with a changing environment. The philosophy behind JET is that human resources should only be used where they are needed; for analyzing bugs.

JET has changed how the testers at Sun Microsystems at Trondheim work. People have become more specialized and this has enabled improvement of the testing processes. This has again led to more types of jobs in testing.

JET is a distributed system for testing on several platforms, and aims to make automated tests easy to maintain. It is written in Java and uses an agent (JAG) on each host to hide operating system dependent details from the tests. When you use JET to test a new piece of software, you must first write some common code that makes it easier to write tests and do common operations. It is Vemund’s experience that the more work you put into creating a good library of functionality for the product, the easier it is to write tests and to maintain them. The sweet spot for JET is when the system under testing is a distributed system.

In JET the tests are written in Java, so the testers need to know programming to write tests. Vemund sees this as a positive trait since there are almost no limits to what you can do. When you lack the full power of a general purpose programming language and its libraries, what you test is often limited by what you can test, and what is easy to test, instead of focusing on risk reduction. It can take longer time to write tests, but they will last longer, thus being better adapted to a situation with long lived products where the same test suite will be run over and over again.