Why Ironhide?
You might be asking yourself “Why would I need this testing suite?” You might say “I do Quality Assurance anyways” or “I can manually test my app as I go”. However think of Ironhide in this way: If you had a button that you could press that said to you “everything is good with the app” or “something is wrong” how often would you press that button? Every time before you release? Every time before you commit? Why not every time you build! Ironhide offers this tool, a magic button to push after you make a change to see if everything still works. Ironhide is a way to both quickly write up and run a test for your new feature, and then keep your tests in a full test suite to check functionality.
On top of offering developers a way to include test driven development into their development cycles, Ironhide can make your Quality Assurance testing much easier. Often QA testing at the end of a development cycle can take a while, maybe even an entire day. Creating a suite of smoke tests that test your apps basic functionality can make everyone’s lives easier, and give you more time to find the bugs in your new features. Ironhide makes this happen by giving you tests that are easy to write, and more importantly easy to read. With a test suite thats easy to run and tell what broke when it fails, Ironhide can help cut down on your QA time significantly.
It’s not uncommon for bug lists to be 100 or more bugs long! Many times this happens because rigorous testing only happening at the end of the development cycle. Without an easy way to test, developers just don’t have the time to manually test every time they commit a change. When bugs are only found at the stage before release, often there is not enough time to fix those bugs before they go out into production. In most of these cases the use of the magic button Ironhide could solve this issue. If testing is happening at every stage of development the number of bugs that come up in QA testing is significantly reduced. In an ideal world, QA should run through their test suite and come back saying “It’s all good, no bugs were found.” Now of course this isn’t always, if ever, going to happen, but Ironhide can help you get close!
