The Brotherhood of Building and Testing

In the past few weeks, I've been embedded in the world of build engineering and configuration management. It has been an eye-opening experience, believe me. There are many splinters and specializations in the software industry, and the area of build engineering is one that I've never really paid attention to until recently. From what I've seen thus far, there are far more connections between building and testing than I've previously known.

There is a web of trust in the process of building any project that one takes a bit for granted, and indeed one must take it for granted. It's impossible to know every detail that every responsibility entails, so you must take for granted that the program manager is doing his job, and the product manager's requirements have been adequately reviewed and vetted out. The one area where the web of trust stops is between developer and testers. The testers are present to be cynical, and in general not trust the output of the developers. This ensures more quality in the software so that the users are not the ones consuming poor products.

I've recently started to think that the web of trust should be breaking down in another place: building. I would say that most engineers take the output of the build engineer a bit for granted. You assume that the build is an instrumented build because the build engineer says so. You assume that the build has the correct fixes in it because the build engineer says so. Well what happens if the build engineer is wrong? Having the correct build is the first step in the testing process, and depending on where you are in the life cycle, the main consumer of the build will be the testers.

I don't think it's too far-fetched to say that a new specialization should open up: build test engineer. The process of building can be complicated enough, depending on the size of your project, and can be a full-time job by itself. Adding value on top of that could be another full-time job. The value I'm referring to is build testing, build metrics, and build consumption.

Just as testers are considered a trusted third-party that can tell you with certainty (i.e., data) the risks and issues found in a product, a build test engineer would be a trusted third-party who could tell you with certainty that the build has or contains the attributes it says it does.