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Better Software is the magazine for software professionals who care about quality. Each issue brings you relevant, timely information to help you build better software. Continuing to deliver in-depth articles on testing, tools, defect tracking, metrics, and management, it's the only commercial magazine exclusively dedicated to software professionals.

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The One-Hour Regression Test
by Steven Woody

Software regression testing is an essential and challenging task for software test groups. By definition, regression testing is the process of verifying that none of the existing system features have been accidentally broken by any new features or recent bug fixes. The main challenges for regression testing are performing as many tests as possible in as short a time as possible and finding any serious regression defects as early as possible in the regression test cycle.

Problems Inherent in Regression Testing
Although it is easy to follow this sequence, there are several problems with this classical approach to regression testing.

Lather-rinse-repeat
The goal of regression testing is to find problems in previously working software features. Although project management may choose to defer fixes or, in some cases, not to fix problems at all, there will be some defects found during regression testing that must be fixed before release. Then the fix-regression test cycle repeats itself, perhaps many more times than the schedule allows.

Any code change can break anything and everything
Project managers often believe that any defects introduced by a code change will be isolated to that particular area of the code and, thus, an abbreviated regression test focused on that particular feature area is sufficient. Eventually you learn that any code change--no matter how isolated--can have indirect, inadvertent, and catastrophic effects on seemingly unrelated areas of the code. Sometimes a bug lies latent in the code for years until some other change is made, which at last reveals the bug.

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