How to Avoid the Integration Pain
November 23, 2007 by Artem Marchenko
Integration, pre-integration and post-integration steps are the wrap-ups that have to be done after the "actual" software development and before the product can be shipped. These steps can include:
- final big testing, ad-hoc testing by everybody available
- different kinds of localization - translation of the program texts into many languages
- writing documentation
-
testing of the translations and documentation
- if you are developing a box product, designing and printing the packages
- etc., etc.
Human Errors
It is a matter of fact, that when a human being performs any action for the first couple of times, a number of unexpected mistakes can happen. If so big integration steps are going to be performed only once in a project lifetime, no surprise things can go wrong even where they shouldn't.
- The word processor used for creating the documentation might suddenly not know how to sort the glossary in a particular language
- The framework your application is based on might suddenly be unable to handle the right-to-left input
- Some Chinese characters might mysteriously be replaced with the pseudo-graphical symbols
- etc., etc.
Train yourself
The solution is simultaneously simple and complex. The only way to perform the actions flawlessly is to try it in advance and train yourself or your tools. If the localization, document or installer creation formatting are done and verified ten times a month, it is unlikely they will let you down at the moment of the delivery. Certainly it is rather difficult to convince a real person to do it all and some things like translation into 20+ languages might be impossible to do every week.
However, there are ways to automate the integration process: the installer, documentation, the actual installation and uninstallation can be performed by a nightly or even hourly script that verifies that the correct files go into the right places, and maybe even do the basic user interface testing. Translations are more difficult to automate, but it many cases during the development process it is possible to "simulate" the localization process by supplying the random French or Chinese words just to verify that the strings look ok in at least few languages.
Then wrapping the application up would take a little more, than printing the packaging and burning the disks.
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About the Author: As the Editor-in-Chief for AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com, Artem is charged with overseeing the direction for content, advertising, and the overall management of the site. Nowadays in his day life, Artem is a product manager in a global telecommunication company where he leads the development of a product developed in extremely distributed environment. Artem has been applying Agile and researching Agile since 2005. Contact Artem
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Comments
but how many days ideally ...
December 23, 2007 by pkaarthikeyan, 4 years 21 weeks ago
Comment id: 1412
...but how many days ideally should be the inetgration testing phase.
Ideally - zero :) Ideally
December 26, 2007 by Artem, 4 years 21 weeks ago
Comment id: 1420
Ideally - zero :)
Ideally the quality should be "built in" into software when it is produced. In reality though not toomany companies are able to have it this way.
Integration testing phase
January 4, 2008 by pinastro, 4 years 19 weeks ago
Comment id: 1432
When you say the integration testing phase to be zero ..i assume you are telling about a project that has already been established (or gone into production).
The kind of project we are doing is a Re-Engineering a complete property architechture in legacy to a new one.So in each iteration the features included are new , hence the nature of integration testing is slightly changing in each iteration.
How we resolved them is by keeping the MLTESTER jobs (mainframes) intact.We did not write new jobs but change the inputs.
Ideally integration testing
January 5, 2008 by Artem, 4 years 19 weeks ago
Comment id: 1434
Ideally integration testing phase should indeed take zero time. However, it doesn't mean that must cut it from a week to zero just because somebody says it.
When one happens to use a long integration testing phase, it usually happens for a reason and it is this underlying problem that is to be solved. Ideal target is there as a guiding star only, not as a rule to start applying tomorrow.
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