Under Test
Today I was thinking about the phrase "under test" as in "we've got to get this code under test so we can fix it." I started of thinking about the way the app we were discussing was laid out. There was (at rock bottom) some persistence stuff. Above that was (on one side) reporting and query, and on the other was some business objects. Above the business objects are some model-like objects (sometimes) and above those are UI-related code. Starting at the "top", with UI presentation, we can test through a browser. That makes it the territory of human by-hand testing and also of browser emulators, browser drivers, and screen-scrapers. Such tests are going to exercise a fully-integrated system, and can be slow due to many features such as database access, file system access, network access to services, etc. Human testing is particularly slow, as it involves reading time, typing time, and time to evaluate results. Human tests we can measure in minu...