Testing @ MySQL

MySQL has always given great emphasis on quality.  This has got even better in the last few years with increased investment in the dedicated test team. The Server test team tripled in size during 5.6 development and all 5.6 features have undergone thorough testing at the hands of the QA team.

I have more than 15 years experience in this industry and have worked on different products and technologies as part of test and development teams. Compared to most others I find the developers in MySQL very involved in testing. Here the developers are expected to write functional tests for their features and bug fixes. This is how it was historically and this continues today in spite of the bigger test team. This model has the following advantages

• Code is in reasonably good shape when delivered to test team
• Testers can focus on more complex tests since the straightforward tests will be written by the developers

Listed below are some of the focus areas of the dedicated test team

• Integration tests – Tests to check how the feature works when it interacts with other features like views, triggers, stored procedures , partitioning etc
• Replication
• Backup using mysqldump
• Concurrency testing
• Exploratory testing
• Bug hunting cycles for finding crashes and result differences 
• Upgrade/Downgrade 
  
• Non functional tests like performance, stress, longevity etc

In my next post I will explain in detail about the process  for qualifying new features