The Tests Never End: An Overview of Software Testing Methods for Actuaries – Part 3 of 3

Have you ever been involved with a software development project?  One thing that all software development projects have in common is testing.  You may have been involved in some of the testing of these systems or maybe you were in meetings where testing was discussed or perhaps you are interested in doing more testing in the work that you are doing.  You may have heard some terms such as unit testing, integration testing and functional testing but are not sure what the differences are. You may also not work with software development but want to understand elements of software testing so that you can apply them to your actuarial work.

In this final installment of a 3-part series, Joe Alaimo and Andy Rallis cover related topics to software testing: Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), How to write a test, Test Driven Development (TDD), and Agile’s relationship to testing. The two explain what each topic is, how each topic relates to the types of testing discussed in earlier installments and why each topic is important. They also discuss considerations and tradeoffs when thinking through implementing CI/CD, TDD or Agile testing.

Links to the tools discussed in the podcast:

GitHub – The most popular code repository (owned by Microsoft)

TravisCI – An early build and test running service for code

TestPad – A tool for test case management