Big business frequently looks to the sporting world for fresh approaches to improve teamwork, motivation and goal setting. All too often the focus tends to be on the high achievers and their results, whilst overlooking the need to plan, develop and perform more like their sporting heroes.

The modern business trend is to adopt an increasingly flexible or agile business model.

In this article we will examine some of the techniques used by athletes and their coaches and explore how these can be harnessed to support such a business environment.

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I went up to London this week to attend my first British Computer Society (BCS) event. The Specialist Group in software Testing (SIGIST) hold quarterly conferences open to testers around the UK. Over 250 testers turned up for a day of presentations and workshops. I opted for all the presentations as the theme was Agile testing (my hot topic of the moment), but I hear the workshops were good too. I’d like to attend more of these and hopefully get the opportunity to present.

I picked up a few useful links:

• The QAGuild (Quality Excellence) has some good tooling information

• A collection of Testing blogs called TestingReflections. Well worth a read.

• Another collection of useful Test information and blogs – The UK Tester Forum

I started writing a comment to Ben Bakowski’s last post on “Stressful testing…“, but decided to turn it into a full post. I was thinking that a key difference between testing a “real world” object such as a car, and something like software, is that the limits aren’t always as clear. A car might have five seats, and might use roads where the speed limit is 70mph – these are concrete numbers, which allow you to make the distinction more easily. If I have a piece of software (especially a piece of middleware), then it’s tricky to know the limits. How many records can my database handle? How big can they be? How many users at once?

When testing middleware, I think you’re usually forced to ask yourself: what do I expect someone to do with this? It’s largely about guesswork and experience with existing customers. I think that an interesting idea to explore, is whether it is appropriate or advisable to set artificial limits on a product’s maximum load. Setting artificial limits could provide actual boundaries to the testing that needs to be done. I can think of a few “real world” analogies:

• Putting a “maximum load” sticker on a lorry – ignore at your own risk.
• Putting a fixed number of seats in the car – “we could fit eight seats in here, but we’ve only put in five, so only try and put five people in it”.
• Fitting a speed limiter (i.e. a hard limit).

We could do the same in software: we could write out log messages when a particular level of load is exceeded; we could put in hard limits to the number of records in a database and the number of concurrent users. The key thing when doing this, I think, would be provide reasonable limits which won’t impede your customers, but at least “frame” your testing. For those die-hard customers who absolutely can’t do without that ten millionth database record, you could always offer a special option to remove the limiters, subject to additional testing, or acceptance of the additional risk.

What do you think?  Would this cause as many problems as it fixes?  Or would it enable you to focus on the testing that matters?