Maintainability

“Temet nosce” (Know thyself)

- Ancient Greek aphorism, here given in Latin.

In the last chapter, we examined security testing and the unique checks related to securing your application. These are vital tests that need special consideration because they do not form part of the core functionality of your product or feature. This chapter considers another area that can be overlooked: maintainability. Unlike the other methods of functional testing, maintainability is not customer-facing, so it is a lower priority when time is short. However, getting this area right makes working with this application easier for everyone involved – testers, the support team, and the developers assigned to fix and improve the code.

You need to consider your code’s instrumentation carefully – what events should it report on its behavior? Only by gathering this information can the product managers know which features are important and which are rarely...