谷歌软件测试之道：创新与实践

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"如何测试谷歌软件" 谷歌在软件测试领域的创新和实践是业界广为称道的，这本《How Google Tests Software》由James Whittaker撰写，深入揭示了谷歌内部的测试策略和方法。这本书受到了来自微软和uTest等业界专业人士的高度评价，他们认为它不仅对谷歌员工，而且对所有希望保持测试实践相关性、竞争力和意义的测试人员来说，都是必读之作。在软件测试领域，谷歌一直扮演着创新者的角色。书中提到，谷歌巧妙地融合了自动化测试和人工测试，整合内部资源与外包服务，并且在近期引领了"野外地测试"与"实验室测试"相结合的新模式，以更全面地评估应用性能。这种对创新的渴望使谷歌能够在解决新问题和推出优质应用方面走在前列。 James Whittaker通过本书提供了一个蓝图，展示了谷歌如何在快速变化的移动应用测试世界中取得成功。他采取了一种计算机科学的方法来处理测试问题，这种方法预计将成为未来软件公司的标准。谷歌采用的流程和技术创新，如日常发布和抬头显示（heads-up displays）等，都揭示了谷歌如何高效且质量保证地进行大规模软件测试。书中的关键知识点包括： 1. **自动化与人工测试的结合**：谷歌将自动化测试工具与人工测试者的工作紧密结合，以提高测试效率和准确性，确保软件质量。 2. **内部与外部资源的融合**：谷歌有效利用内部团队和外部服务提供商的资源，创建一个灵活的测试网络，适应快速迭代的开发环境。 3. **野外地测试**：除了传统的实验室环境测试，谷歌还引入了真实用户环境下的测试，收集实际使用情况下的反馈，以提升用户体验。 4. **持续集成与每日发布**：谷歌实施持续集成策略，每天进行软件发布，这需要强大的自动化测试支持，以确保频繁发布不会牺牲产品质量。 5. **创新技术的应用**：例如，抬头显示（heads-up displays）可能被用于实时监控测试结果，为测试团队提供即时反馈，从而快速定位和解决问题。 6. **计算机科学测试方法**：Whittaker提出的测试方法论基于严谨的计算机科学原理，旨在建立未来的行业标准。 7. **流程创新**：谷歌的测试流程设计有助于适应快速变化的技术环境，鼓励团队迅速响应并解决新出现的问题。这本书不仅对测试工程师，也对产品经理、开发人员以及任何关注软件质量的人来说，都是了解和学习现代软件测试实践的重要参考资料。通过学习谷歌的测试理念和实践，读者可以更好地理解如何在自己的项目中实施有效的测试策略，以提升产品的稳定性和用户满意度。

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worked, of course, but in the process, we learned valuable lessons and

practices that are applicable to any company that wants to grow or move at

the speed of Google. We learned how to have attention to quality without

derailing development or the speed at which we got things done. The

resulting process, with some insights into the thinking behind them and

what makes them work, is what this book is about. If you want to under-

stand how Google met the challenges of testing in the twenty-first century

on modern Internet, mobile, and client applications, then you have come to

the right place. I may wish it was me who was telling the rest of the story,

but James and his coauthors beat me to it and they have nailed the essence

of what testing is like here at Google.

One final note on the book: James Whittaker is the guy who made this

book happen. He came to Google, dug in to the culture, took on big and

important projects, and shipped products such as Chrome, Chrome OS,

and dozens of smaller ones. Somewhere in that time, he became the public

face of Google testing. But, unlike some of his other books, much of this

material is not his. He is as much a reporter on the evolution of how

Google tests software as he is a contributor to it. Keep that in mind as you

read it because James will probably try to take all the credit for himself!

As Google grew from 200 to over 20,000 employees, there were many

people who played important roles in developing and putting into action

our testing strategy. James credits many of them and they have contributed

directly by writing sidebars and giving interviews that are published in

this book. However, no one, not me, James, or anyone else mentioned in

this book, has had as much influence as Patrick Copeland, the architect of

our current organizational structure and leader of Google’s Engineering

Productivity team. Every tester in the company reports up through Patrick

and he is the executive whose vision created what James has documented

and contributed to here. If anyone can take credit for how Google tests

software today, it’s Patrick. I am not just saying this because he’s my boss; I

am saying it because he’s my boss and he told me to say it!

Alberto Savoia is an engineering director and innovation agitator at

Google. He first joined Google in 2001 when, among other things, he man-

aged the launch of Google AdWords and played a key role in kick-starting

a developer / unit testing culture in the company. He is also the author of

The Way of Testivus and of “Beautiful Tests” in O’Reilly’s Beautiful Code.

Note by James Whittaker: I couldn’t agree more! As a scribe and jour-

nalist in this process, I owe most of the material to the organization that

Patrick has created. And I am not just saying this because he gave me per-

mission to write this book. As my boss, he made me write this book!

Foreword by Alberto Savoia xv

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A Fault to Guide Software Testing

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Foreword by Patrick Copeland

My adventure with Google started in March of 2005. If you read Alberto’s

foreword, you know a bit about the conditions of Google around that time.

It was small but beginning to show signs of serious growing pains. It was

also a time of rapid technological change as the web world was welcoming

dynamic content and the cloud was becoming a viable alternative to the

then dominant world of client-server.

That first week, I sat with the rest of the Nooglers topped with a tri-

colored propeller hat listening to the founders discussing corporate strate-

gy at a weekly company meeting called TGIF. I knew little about what I

had gotten myself into. I was naïve enough to be excited and aware

enough to be more than a little intimated. The speed and scale of Google

made my previous decade of 5-year ship cycles seem like poor preparation.

Worse still, I think I was the only tester wearing one of those Noogler hats.

Surely there were more of us somewhere!

I joined Google when engineering was just shy of 1,000 people. The

testing team had about 50 full timers and some number of temporary

workers I never could get my head around. The team was called “Testing

Services” and focused the majority of its energy on UI validation and

jumping into projects on an as-needed basis. As you might imagine, it

wasn’t exactly the most glorified team at Google.

But at that time it was enough. Google’s primary businesses were

Search and Ads. The Google world was much smaller than it is today, and

a thorough job of exploratory testing was enough to catch most quality

concerns. But the world was slowly changing. Users were hitting the web

in unprecedented numbers and the document-based web was giving way

to the app-based web. You could feel the inevitability of growth and

change where the ability to scale and get to market quickly would be the

difference between relevance and…a place you did not want to be.

Inside Google, the scale and complexity issues were buckling Testing

Services. What worked well with small homogenous projects was now

burning out good testers as they leapt from one project that was on fire to

the next. And topping all that off was Google’s insistence to release quick-

er. Something needed to give and I had the choice between scaling this

manually intensive process or changing the game completely. Testing

Services needed a radical transformation to match the radical change hap-

pening to the industry and the rest of Google.

I would very much like to say that I drew upon my vast wealth of

experience and conjured the perfect test organization, but the truth is that

my experience had taught me little more than the wrong way to do things.

Every test organization I ever worked as part of or led was dysfunctional

in one way or the other. Stuff was always broken. The code was broken, the

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tests were broken, and the team was broken! I knew what it meant to be

buried under quality and technical debt where every innovative idea was

squashed lest it risk breaking the fragile product it depended on. If my

experience taught me anything, it was how not to do testing.

In all my interactions up to this point, one thing about Google was

clear. It respected computer science and coding skill. Ultimately, if testers

were to join this club, they would have to have good computer

science fundamentals and some coding prowess. First-class citizenship

demanded it.

If I was going to change testing at Google, I needed to change what it

meant to be a tester. I used to try to imagine the perfect team and how such

a team would shoulder the quality debt and I kept coming back to the

same premise: The only way a team can write quality software is when the

entire team is responsible for quality. That meant product managers, devel-

opers, testers…everyone. From my perspective, the best way to do this was

to have testers capable of making testing an actual feature of the code base.

The testing feature should be equal to any feature an actual customer

might see. The skill set I needed to build features was that of a developer.

Hiring testers who can code features is difficult; finding feature devel-

opers who can test is even more difficult. But the status quo was worse

than either so I forged ahead. I wanted testers who could do more for their

products and at the same time, I wanted to evolve the nature and owner-

ship of the testing work, which meant asking for far larger investment

from the development teams. This is the one organizational structure I had

yet to see implemented in all my time in the industry and I was convinced

it was right for Google, and I thought that as a company, we were ready

for it.

Unfortunately, few others in the company shared my passion for such

profound and fundamental change. As I began the process of socializing

my equal-but-different vision for the software testing role, I eventually

found it difficult to find a lunch partner! Engineers seemed threatened by

the very notion that they would have to play a bigger role in testing, point-

ing out “that’s what test is for.” Among testers, the attitude was equally

unsavory as many had become comfortable in their roles and the status

quo had such momentum that change was becoming a very hard problem.

I kept pressing the matter mostly out of fear that Google’s engineering

processes would become so bogged down in technical and quality debt

that I’d be back to the same five-year ship cycles I had so happily left

behind in the old client-server world. Google is a company of geniuses

focused on innovation and that entrepreneurial makeup is simply incom-

patible with long product ship cycles. This was a battle worth fighting and

I convinced myself that once these geniuses understood the idea of devel-

opment and testing practices for a streamlined and repeatable “technology

factory,” they would come around. They would see that we were not a

startup anymore and with our rapidly growing user base and increasing

technical debt of bugs and poorly structured code would mean the end of

their coder’s playground.

xviii Foreword by Patrick Copeland

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I toured the product teams making my case and trying to find the

sweet spot for my argument. To developers, I painted a picture of continu-

ous builds, rapid deployment, and a development process that moved

quickly, leaving more time for innovation. To testers, I appealed to their

desire to be full engineering partners of equal skill, equal contribution, and

equal compensation.

Developers had the attitude that if we were going to hire people skilled

enough to do feature development, then we should have them do feature

development. Some of them were so against the idea that they filled my

manager’s inbox with candid advice on how to deal with my madness.

Fortunately, my manager ignored those recommendations.

Testers, to my surprise, reacted similarly. They were vested in the way

things were and quick to bemoan their status, but slow to do anything

about it.

My manager’s reaction to the complaints was telling: “This is Google,

if you want something done, then do it.”

And so that’s what I did. I assembled a large enough cadre of like-

minded folks to form interview loops and we began interviewing candi-

dates. It was tough going. We were looking for developer skills and a tester

mindset. We wanted people who could code and wanted to apply that skill

to the development of tools, infrastructure, and test automation. We had to

rethink recruiting and interviewing and then explain that process to the

hiring committees who were entrenched and comfortable with the way

things were.

The first few quarters were rough. Good candidates were often torpe-

doed in the vetting process. Perhaps they were too slow to solve some

arcane coding problem or didn’t fare well in something that someone

thought was important but that had nothing to do with testing skill. I

knew hiring was going to be difficult and made time each week to write

hiring justification after hiring justification. These went to none other than

Google co-founder Larry Page who was (and still is) the last approval in

the hiring process. He approved enough of them that my team began to

grow. I often wonder if every time Larry hears my name he still thinks,

“Hiring testers!”

Of course, by this time, I had made enough noise trying to get buy-in

that we had no choice but to perform. The entire company was watching

and failure would have been disastrous. It was a lot to expect from a small

test team supported by an ever-changing cast of vendors and temps. But

even as we struggled to hire and I dialed back the number of temps we

used, I noticed change was taking hold. The more scarce testing resources

became, the more test work was left for developers to do. Many of the

teams rose to the challenge. I think if technology had stayed the same as it

was, this alone would have taken us nearly where we needed to be.

But technology wasn’t standing still and the rules of development and

testing were changing rapidly. The days of static web content were gone.

Browsers were still trying to keep up. Automation around the browser was

a year behind the already tardy browsers. Making testing a development

Foreword by Patrick Copeland xix

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