Should we practice "system test driven development?"
Maybe not! ATDD and similar things are already here!
Caught a v neat article on InfoQ by Stefan Friese on architecturally aligned testing... it's useful read.
I reproduce my comment, below, before I forget a few simple ideas...
Stefan, a great article!
Also check out Caitie MaCaffrey's talks / paper on distributed systems verification . . .
Rechtin on Ultraquality - The Challenge
Excellence Beyond Measure and the need for Ultraquality Systems
Continuing the complex systems architecture theme and discussion of ultra-quality systems, the excerpt below is taken from Eberhardt Rechtin, Systems Architecting, Creating and Building Complex Systems, 1991, Chap 8.
Several issues spring to mind today, particularly how the need for some ultra-quality systems continues to be driven . . .
Rechtin on Ultraquality - Redundancy and Fault Tolerance
The Writings of a Complex Systems Architecture Legend
In his classic (but criminally overlooked) 1991 book "Systems Architecting, Creating and Building Complex Systems," Eberhardt Rechtin discusses technical, managerial and architectural responses to the challenge of building high quality systems. Despite being several decades old, 'modern' techniques like Lean manufacturing . . .
Talk on Continuous Delivery Architecture and Practices
Nondeterminism, xUnit, up-skilling, TDD materials and debates
I did a talk recently at the Sydney Alt.Net Meetup on testing practices for Continuous Delivery.
The talk was an introductory tour of the Continuous Delivery ecosystem, as it relates to technical practices such as TDD (for example, xUnit Test Patterns) and software architecture for testability. You can find the slides on Slideshare.
. . .Quality Factors for Continuous Delivery
Architectural Quality Factors Revisited... for CD
In an initial post on architectural quality factors, we describe the...
availability, modifiability, performance, security, testability, and usability
... of software intensive systems [Bass et al, 2013].
The goal of Continuous Delivery is for systems to be able to 'continuously demonstrate their . . .
Legacy Architecture and Testability
Manual Test Teams and Testability Architectural Debt
The architecture of specification subsystems has always been critical to quality factors like cycle time -
Industry estimates indicate that between 30 and 50 percent (or in some cases, even more) of the cost of developing well-engineered systems is taken up by testing. If the software architect can reduce this cost, the payoff . . .