Test Layering is very useful

We used the Test Layering chart today. One of our new products was showing a lot of regression bugs, and we need to make it mostly bug free for a release. So, we went through the table from top to bottom and added or improved some layers. I’m finding that this exercise is useful for startups up through big enterprise projects.

Our specific actions were:

• Add a “test” status to our tickets so that we can send major changes to a human QA consultant for review (layer 3).
• Improve the continuous integration system so that it will run automated tests and vote before review (layer 5). This allows us to ask for more intensive manual testing during code review (layer 4).
• Because the new system is built with a service architecture, and multiple services, our CI (layer 5) will focus on testing calls to the services. We made a special project to add these tests. This was a big change compared to the unit tests that we used for our monolithic apps, and an important step to scalable architecture and project management.