Eating Your Own Dogfood: Testing Your Software Before the Scientists Break it - Jonathan Woodring

Abstract: One of the best ways to test your software is to become your #1 user. While this doesn’t catch every single bug, because your users are clever, it will catch many of them before they’ll ever see them. I’ll show how our integrated testing runs “the real world,” by continually exercising our software with actual scenarios. The benefits include: (1) being annoyed with your own software, so you’ll develop new features to assist the users (actual features, not “features”), (2) automatically writing the dreaded documentation that we all hate spending our time on, and (3) breaking your software before your users, saving you from answering (fewer) phone calls and emails. Learning Objectives: Understanding testing, documentation, and feature development Intended Audience: Software developers/engineers/scientists.