test objects design

Foundations for software engineering - AC

The key in transferring lessons from manufacturing to engineering is to recognize that the “unvalidated decision” is the unit of inventory in engineering (or cooperative games of invention and communication in general)

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Replace manufacturing’s flow of materials with engineering’s flow of decisions, however, and the rules governing the two are remarkably similar. One remaining difference is that the flow of decisions in an engineering project has loops (requests for validation and correction), which designers of manufacturing lines try hard to avoid. These loops complicate the optimal strategies for the team but do not change the rules of the situation

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• The users and sponsors make decisions about what they want.
  They feed those decisions to UI designers and business analysts (BAs).

• The UI designers and BAs, collaboratively with the users or on
  their own, make detailed decisions about the appearances, behaviors,
  and data to be put into the system. They feed those decisions to the
  programmers.

• The programmers make decisions about the program. Those
  decisions probably change some of the users’ requests and the decisions
  made by the UI designers and BAs, but let’s skip that topic for the
  moment. However they make their decisions, those decisions go to the
  testers.

• The testers make decisions about where the foregoing people have made mistakes (note: bolding mine. Yes, I am a tester) .

The testers can’t tell whether the program is correct until they get
running code; the programmers can’t know what to code until the UI
designers and BAs make their detailed choices; and the UI designers and
BAs can’t decide what to request until the sponsors and users make up
their minds.

As with manufacturing, there is “inventory,” there are
“work-in-progress” queues between work stations, and there is the
problem of selecting batch sizes for those handoffs.

The engineering team’s inventory is made up of unvalidated
decisions. The more decisions saved up and passed from one person to
another at one time, the larger the batch size involved in that handoff