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Reversal?

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I’ve been studying recently for a Chartered Management Institute Level 5 qualification. As my time in my current role comes to an end then it’s important to make sure that the management activities and experience that I have built up in my 9 years at Nokia is accurately reflected on my C.V. in a way that future recruiters will recognise. But the good thing is that through the course I have also been introduced to some techniques which are new to me, are useful for the future and can be applied to the software testing field as much as anywhere else.

Recently I learnt about a problem solving technique called reversal. It’s nothing new I know, but it appealed to my testers mind. It appealed to the part of me who wants to see how things could be made worse, how faults could be found, and how increased risk could be identified. The sort of mind-set that can equally be applied to software testing situations.

The reversals technique is a basic information based decision making technique. It breaks problem solving down into the following activities:

Identify the situation under study.

  • Consider how the situation could be made worse.
  • Create as many options as possible which will make the situation worse.
  • Reverse the options to identify ways of improving the situation.

As an example, consider a situation where a lack of road capacity has been identified. Using the technique, one could come up with options such as:

  • Close all the motorways.
  • Discourage homeworking.
  • Close alternative transport mechanisms.

Then by reversing these, one could come up with solutions which could improve the situation:

  • Build more motorways.
  • Encourage homeworking.
  • Build more alternative transport mechanisms.

A simple example I know, but you get the picture.

I think we can apply this to software testing as well. I recently read the blog post by Ilari Henrik Aegerter about What you Can Do if your Brain just Refuses to Understand and one addition I’d make to his list would be to consider some problem solving techniques. I find they help me unlock the locked parts of my brain. Reversal is one such technique.

Consider the situation where you know a bug exists but you just cannot reach the root cause. If you’ve run out of options when it comes to reproducing a bug, consider reversal. Think about what really will not cause the bug to happen, what combination of key presses or code paths that won’t help. Then reverse them. Consider a situation where you need to load test a system. What could you do that would actually make it faster? Then reverse them.

Hopefully it gives you a new perspective and another tool in the belt.

 

 

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Experiences of Rapid Software Testing

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Last week I had the pleasure of attending Rapid Software Testing training, organised by The Ministry of Testing. Rapid Software Testing is a technique popularised by James Bach and Michael Bolton and hopefully is not something new to you, but in case it is then I’d recommend looking at James Bach’s website. He explains it much better than me 🙂

The course was in Cambridge in the UK, and after a quick and easy train ride up then it was easy to find the hotel, dump the bags, and then go out to the Software Testing Club Meetup. This was a good start to the course, an initial networking event which James also attended, as well as a lot of local testers who were not attending the course. We had some great discussions and I met a lot of new people; you can see some photos from the event which have been posted up by Rosie, the organiser.

Day 1

Then to the first day of the course itself. From the moment the course started it was apparent that this was not your typical technical course. James’ style is well—known, just search YouTube if you want to see him in action, and he carried this into the course itself. He certainly knows his stuff, and presents in typical provocative style and is capable of causing many eureka moments. It’s very enjoyable, but initially tough, stuff.

We focused mostly in the first day on what Rapid Software Testing is, and the overall philosophy of the techniques. Rapid Software Testing is most useful to encourage testers to defend and think for themselves from a position of technical authority, especially useful in periods of uncertainty. Plenty of examples were given and James was able to draw upon his many years of experience in testing, both hardware and software. The time went by quickly and there was plenty of audience participation. James’ style is very much to put the audience members on the spot and ask some very difficult and blunt questions in order to replicate the pressures that testers can feel as part of project teams. To a few this comes naturally, but to most of the audience, this was a long way out of the comfort zone. We tried to help out whoever had been picked for a particular challenge, in order that the class as a whole could benefit.

The day concluded with an exercise on testing some everyday objects. Sounds simple, right? Well no. In case you will go on the course yourself then I will not give too much away, but suffice to say that there is much more to testing something which appears simple, than one at first thinks. It’s these sorts of exercises that open the mind and help learning.

Day 2

After a good dinner with some new software testing friends, and a decent night’s sleep, it was time for day 2. Here we went into more details of Rapid Software Testing and the relevant testing models. Again the examples given were general, intended to make you think like a tester irrespective of your background, and plenty of pressure was applied to those who James selected from the audience. We looked at the differences between scripted and un-scripted testing and exploded some myths about both areas. We also talked a lot about oracles and why they are essential in testing. As an example, I was surprised to find that a person can be considered as oracle.

We also discussed heuristics a lot. Rapid Software Testing has many heuristics, the fact that James can remember and explain them all straight from his head is somewhat impressive. As with a lot of the techniques and information, a fair amount of common sense thinking was clearly applied when inventing the heuristics, but it was good to get names put to techniques that I was using already, for consistency if nothing else. There is a danger of quoting too many heuristics of course, especially when dealing with other’s within project teams and management. James’ view seems to be that by bombarding those outside of testing with information and explanations, using the relevant heuristics, that testers gain legitimacy. I do not agree with his approach to the length that he presents it – clearly testers need to be able to explain themselves – but there is a danger of losing credibility if too many heuristics are invented and then explained, which merely represent ‘day-to-day’ work. Take a look at James’ slides and see if you agree.

By the end of the day we were questioning practically everything about testing and about the way we were working. There is a danger from this course that one starts to question too much but one needs to start small and work up I think. That’s certainly what I intend to do.

Day 3

The final day of the course started bright and early with more of the same. We focused on exploratory testing again, with more details, and talked a lot about documentation, metrics and information. The idea of focusing on a particular testing task, using some heuristics, but knowing when it is not working and de-focusing at this point, was a great learning for me. We also went into more detail on exploratory and session based techniques, something which I wish we had spent a bit more time on in previous days.

The main exercise for the day was based around finding a pattern for a system based upon dice. I won’t go into too many details on this (it’s explained pretty well at Better Testing) and also I do not want to give away a potential solution to anyone. But suffice to say it was a great opportunity to put into practice some of the techniques that we had learnt. Our group were not the quickest but neither were we the slowest, and it was certainly a good challenge.

The day then concluded with a wrap-up and overview of what we had learnt. Then some brief goodbyes and swapping of LinkedIn invites, and home to try and make sense of a busy three days and how what I had learnt could be applied to myself and the team members in my teams.

Overall

If you get the chance to go on Rapid Software Testing then go. Don’t think too hard about it, the course if very worthwhile and you will get a lot out of it. It is not easy, you will most likely feel uncomfortable at times with the training approach and some of the content may well seem obvious on first pass. But once you think more, and you start to question your own approach, with the techniques, tools, and even just the words, to back-up what you already know, then this course should make you a better tester. It would have been good to have seen a little more on session based techniques in detail and more about the tools that can be used, but I understand James does a separate course on this.

Thanks also go to Rosie Sherry, the course organiser. This was the first course that The Ministry of Testing have organised and if this first one is anything to go by then Ministry of Testing has a bright future. The venue and organisation was great, there was a really friendly, small company feel about things, and it was very easy to meet new people and learn together. Definitely three days well spent.

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Learning Time

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Tomorrow I’m leaving the safety of the South to journey far North* for something that I’ve been looking forward to for a long time. I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to sign-up for James Bach’s Rapid Software Testing course which has been arranged by The Ministry of Testing in Cambridge.

To say I’ve been looking forward to this for a while would be an understatement. Unfortunately due to budget constraints then it’s not been possible for me to get on courses like this in the past few years but ‘fortunately’ now that things are closing, then there’s a bit more money available for training and this will be money very well spent.

First stop is the Software Testing Club meetup tomorrow in Cambridge then on Wednesday the course starts. I don’t know what to expect but if it’s three days of hard but rewarding learning then I will be very happy. Having already taken a look at the course outline and slides then I’m sure it will be.

I’ll try and blog daily about my experiences, assuming I have the time and brain power left to do so 🙂

 

* (non-UK readers – we have a big North-South joke thing going on in the UK. If a place is north of Watford, which is a bit north of London, then us native southerners joke we’re out of the safety of the south and that it’s grim up north 🙂 Even though it isn’t and Cambridge is not even in really in the north anyway).

blog, Testing

Rumours of the Death of the Test Case

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The picture above shows Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name of Mark Twain. You may remember him as the author of Huckleberry Finn, and a number of other books. Why is he here in this post about testing on this blog about testing? Well Mark Twain was also the author of this famous quote, which came about when his obituary was published in an American newspaper while he was still very much alive:

“The rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated”. 

 Recently there has been a lot in the testing press, online and on social networks regarding the death of test cases. “Test cases are so 1980’s” was one tweet I saw. I looked at this and thought “Why?” Why are test cases suddenly out of date or dead, why is scripted testing suddenly seem as a bad thing? Are people just trying to be cool, thinking only exploratory testing or session based testing is needed and test cases are suddenly obsolete?

I think there is a place for both disciplines and it seems others agree with me. Sure, test cases that add no value, and test cases which are merely endlessly repeated by testers who are thinking more about what to have for dinner tonight than what they are testing, are of course worse than useless. They give you a false vision of quality, a sense that everything is OK when clearly it is not. Where testing should add value and provoke debate and opinion they merely suppress the discipline to ‘button pushing’. But the act of designing a good test case, of spending the time and brain power to ensure that the system under test is exercised in a clear, efficient and repeatable way can only be a good thing. It should not be reduced to something that is perceived to be out of date, stuck in the 80’s or worthless. It’s still a very valuable tool in the testers arsenal, allowing them to get an upfront view of the changing requirements of the system they are testing and to document in a clear and consistent way how they intend to test.

Scripted testing and exploratory techniques should sit hand-in-hand. Both add value. In my experience you need both. An illustration of context driven testing is “The essential value of any test case lies in its ability to provide information (i.e. to reduce uncertainty).” A good test case does exactly that. It provides information. It can help show a system will be testable at a point where that system may not even be is testable. It enables others to learn the system and it provides a way of sharing information between those working on the system and outside of it. No two testers have the same level of experience. Test cases can enable consistency in the areas of a test strategy where that is needed. In the case of regulatory approvals and safety critical systems then they are mandatory anyway.

 

So let’s not let the test case become an old, out-of-date idea. Let’s make sure that it’s one technique we use as part of a well-rounded test strategy whose aim is to add value to whatever system we find ourselves testing.

blog, Experiences, mobile, Testing

Q4 Smartphone Sales – What Does It Mean for Testing?

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Gartner have recently published their Q4 2011 smartphone sales report. You can view it here: What does it tell us about the current state of the industry, and affect can this have on our work as testers in the mobile space?

Operating System 4Q11Units 4Q11 Market Share (%) 4Q10Units 4Q10 Market Share (%)
Android 75,906.1 50.9 30,801.2 30.5
iOS 35,456.0 23.8 16,011.1 15.8
Symbian 17,458.4 11.7 32,642.1 32.3
Research In Motion 13,184.5 8.8 14,762.0 14.6
Bada 3,111.3 2.1 2,026.8 2.0
Microsoft 2,759.0 1.9 3,419.3 3.4
Others 1,166.5 0.8 1,487.9 1.5
Total 149,041.8 100.0 101,150.3 100.0

Android Is Still King and iOS Is Increasing

Looking at the volume data, i.e. the number of devices running each platform, we can see a number of key points. Android increased market share from the same time last year, up to 50% of the worldwide market from only 30% a year ago. This represents a lot of devices. Android covers a wide price bracket, and devices based upon Android are available in a number of different form factors, display sizes and hardware configurations. The platform is clearly fragmenting even more significantly in order to covers these different needs.

Apple continued to increase market share, up to 24% of the market in Q4. The launch of the iPhone 4S has had an affect, as well as cost cutting of the earlier devices, a standard Apple launch policy.

As for the rest – Symbian decreased from 32% to 12%, primarily as a result of Nokia’s decision to announce the death of the platform and the knock on effect to consumer demand. RIM’s Blackberry OS lost ground, down to 9% from 14%. Microsoft’s WP platform didn’t fare well, only 1.9% of devices sold ran this OS.

 

What Does This Mean for Testers?

What’s very clear from the smartphone sales in Q4 is that there are still a large number of manufacturers in the market, and they are producing a lot of products. Growth was 47% year-on-year. This has some impacts for testing:

 

  1. Mobile applications will become impossible to ignore for a lot of companies in 2012. That means mobile applications testing will become more and more important.
  2. There are a lot of different device manufacturers and OS’s.
  3. Testers will need to cover a lot of devices and test strategies will need to reflect this.
  4. Anecdotal evidence is that the testing and QA efforts are not increasing to meet the current demand. Many applications are launched with serious bugs still present, indicating testing was not sufficient.

 

Probably the most difficult decision when designing a mobile test strategy is to decide the coverage of the OS and of the devices themselves. A typical mobile application launch strategy these days will focus on iOS and Android as the primary launch platforms for good reason – these are where the market share is, and therefore where the money is. Typically a third launch platform would then focus on Symbian, Blackberry or WP. For testers this means that there is a need to learn the skills and gain the experience with these platforms, and a clear focus on iOS and Android will initially be a good strategy.

For anyone who focuses on Android then there are additional challenges. The sheer variety of Android devices available now is staggering, from cheap, often un-licensed local brands right up to the flagship devices running the latest version OS version,  Ice Cream Sandwich. This poses many issues for anyone developing mobile applications and those testing them – being able to cover all the different configurations is difficult and care is needed to ensure sufficient coverage. It can help to know the target market for the particular application, the sort of devices available to the customers and the expectations towards key criteria such as performance and usability, as well as just ensuring that the functional aspects of the application are OK.

 

Mobile Website Testing Needs Additional Focus

For those testing mobile websites then the problem becomes even larger. A mobile test strategy for a particular application can be designed around the particular OS that application is written for, and relatively easily adapted for other OS’s at a later date. The same cannot be said of a mobile website strategy. There’s a need to provide as much coverage as possible across a significantly wider selection of OS’s and devices, some outside of smartphone scope as well, in order to ensure that the website is functioning correctly and adequately displayed. Tools such as the validator from W3 http://validator.w3.org/mobile/ can help to some extent but they are not a substitute for real testing on a real device.

 

Covering Most Devices

Covering the largest selection of devices is very important. It is not easy. Companies such as SOASTA, PerfectoMobile and DeviceAnywhere are worth checking out, since they take away the burden of device ownership from the company or tester. Crowd sourced testing will become important as well, and there are a number of companies working in this space. But there is significant scope for mobile testers here, and a significant need for more testing than currently.

Overall we can see that the smartphone sector is still growing and the market for applications is increasing. Anecdotal evidence is that the testing and QA efforts are not increasing to meet this demand, and that’s where testers can play their part.

Experiences, Testing

My First STC Meetup

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Meeting New People

Last night I went to my first Software Testing Club Meetup in Guildford, Surrey.

What’s A Software Testing Club Meetup?

A Software Testing Club Meetup is simply a meeting of like-minded people. Mostly testers 🙂 It’s an opportunity to talk testing and normally have a beer or two. And in this case it was pie night in The Keystone so there was some great food as well.

So What Happened?

It was a very enjoyable evening. There were a great bunch of people there. ‘Hello’ everyone at IDBS, and all the other people that I met, talked testing and ate pies with. This was the first meetup that’s been done in this area, and also the first time I’ve gone on my own to anything like this, but it was really easy to settle in and get chatting. We had some good discussions about Selenium, software testing certification, and I got some great tips on freelancing from Alan at StoryIQ.

If you’ve never been to an event like this then you really should go. People are friendly, and it’s a great place outside of work to talk, and to find out experiences from other parts of the industry and from testers working in other companies.

Rather stupidly I forgot my camera, but fortunately other’s didn’t so there’s some pictures here.

Thanks to Lynda for organising, and I hope there’s another one soon.

blog, Experiences, management, practices, team, Testing

!(Certification) = !(New Job)

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There’s a lot said in the testing press and blogs about certification. There’s some well known haters of ISTQB and a few, albeit quieter, exponents. There is of course the training providers shouting loudly about their guarenteed pass rates, how their courses are faster than all the others, and how you won’t survive in testing without the qualifications that you can get from them. Is certification as important as they say? I’m beginning to think that maybe it is, but not for the reasons their sales people present.

Firstly some background. I’m ISEB Foundation and Practitioner certified. I enjoyed the courses which I did with the excellent Grove Consultants a few years ago. OK, the exams were not fun but the courses were. I felt like I learned something and I went along because I wanted to learn. The qualification was good, but secondary. I felt it wasn’t essential. I still feel this way, I’m not an out-and-out ISTQB basher but I feel things are beginning to go too far.

Once I became a team leader, and then a test manager I continued to send people on the courses. Some didn’t want to go, but I felt it was important for them to learn something new, and more importantly to learn the same way, and using the same information, that the rest of the team had already learnt. It gave some consistency. That was useful.

Fast forward a few years. I now have a team of testers and delivery ops people. Times have been hard and training has been hard to come by, by the time these people joined the team there was no training available that would lead to the ISTQB/ ISEB certifications. Has the quality of what we do decreased? Well, no. If anything, we’ve gone out and trained ourselves, trained ourselves, and updated our ways-of-working in even better ways. We are still consistent in our approach, and as a bonus, some people can now train others. Also a good skill. Not getting the ISTQB training has annoyed some, whilst others weren’t bothered at all.

Now my team and I find ourselves in a new situation. Soon we will all lose our jobs as R&D is moved overseas. Suddenly the issue of certification slams itself forward again. Most of the job ads scream ISTQB certified, for recruiters it’s almost the first question asked “Are you ISTQB certified?”. How have we come to this?

I think a lot of the testing community is stuck in a vicious circle. If we get lazy with our recruitment then we quickly fall into a trap of just putting “ISTQB certified” in the “Essential Requirements” section of our job ads. We are the ones who caused the recruiters to ask “Are you ISTQB certified?” Certification within the industry becomes self fulfilling. And those of us recruiting testers don’t necessarily get better testers.

So what’s the solution? More certification? I think all those of us who recruit for software testers need to re-visit what we look for in a tester, to adjust our outlook and our requirements so that we are trying to find those who are good at what they do, not what they have studied. A few years ago I used to run a written interview test for candidates which was based on the ISTQB syllabus. Many of those with the qualification failed.

And to my team, without certification and needing to find new jobs? I’ve sent them on ISTQB courses. It’s only fair, they need the best start they can get in their job searches. But if I find myself in this situation again then I hope that it’s not this way….

* For those of you without any programming knowldge – ! in the title means “Not” 🙂

Image: jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

blog, Experiences, Exploratory Testing, Testing

Some Brief Words On ET for Mobiles

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No not the short, funny coloured alien guy….

Yesterday I attended a exploratory testing session for the latest change that my team are testing, on new feature phones. So we’re talking mass market devices, ones where a bug let out into the field can wipe out your profit and destroy your reputation. So we like to get our QA right, you could say.

Overall the session went well. We found some bugs even though the feature under test is pretty close to release maturity now. There was a great mix of developers, testers and some of the release ops team (aka the CI guys). We like to use these sessions to bring the team together. Using Agile sdlc’s helps here anyway, but having everyone testing together and helping each other is great for the team spirit and the togetherness. It was good fun.

So here’s what went well and what to try differently next time:

* Make sure you do not limit your sessions to just the testers in your company. Get everyone together, it’s fun.
* The leader of the session is important to keep things flowing. Our test lead brought ready flashed phones. And food. That helped.
* Make sure you have a structure to the session. We used charters.

And some areas to learn from and change:

* Getting results and statistics from the session wasn’t easy. Next time we will try session based (as I’ve used in other teams).
* Get some commitment from participants and make sure they come on time. People who drift in and out break the focus of those testing.
* Make sure there are chargers and SIMs with relevant features available.

Overall it was most enjoyable. I can’t wait for the next one.

*and in the true spirit of mobile, I’ve written this whole post on a Nokia E7 using cutepress. Yep, I’m still a Nokia user, and still mobile obsessed 🙂

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Rapid Software Testing

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If you have a chance today then I would recommend reading this article on Rapid Software Testing. It’s an interview with Michael Bolton and gives a great overview of the approach and methodolgy.

I’m signed up for James Bach’s only UK course in March to learn much more about Rapid Software Testing. I cannot wait.

Steve

If you want to sign-up for the course too then you really should. It’s organised by The Ministry of Testing, the new offshoot from Software Testing Club. A 3-day, hands-on class on March 7 – 9th 2012 in Cambridge, UK. Hope to see you there.