Category Archives: practices

blog, Experiences, practices, Testing

Automated Functional Testing – A Test Activity?

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If you are a functional test automation expert then times are good. There’s big bucks to be made in the contracting game, companies are desperate for candidates to ‘automate everything’ and to get to this oddly perceived test automation nirvana that those who are either mis-informed or have hidden agenda’s seem to feel fit to promote.

This has made me think. Primarily about how we have got to this state? Is it because, as the testing community, we have wanted to own test automation? Is it because those outside of the test community see test automation as less important than the production code that it tests? Is it that we just built up an expertise and then protected it just for the money?

Some might say that what has actually happened is that we now have a situation where second rate developers now have a great way to stay in the development game. There is a danger, in the apparent supply-side crisis that we find the industry in, that companies merely employ anyone who says they know something about test automation, without doing the same due diligence that one would do for a development position. This would be a mistake.

In my mind there is a solution to all these problems, and that solution comes from treating test automation just like production code. And that means primarily using developers to write it. Sure, you may choose to have testers involved as well, where they have the skills and expertise, but let’s not try and force skills on people who don’t want them, and let’s not accept second rate people just because they can ‘do some test automation’. One advantage to using developers is that test automation becomes a team thing, and you are less likely to spend time playing catch-up when development slips. One downside; it’s going to look like the team has slowed down. Believe me, it hasn’t. It’s just got more effective, and is playing to the right skill-sets.

Don’t believe me? 🙂 Here’s a couple more examples from Rob Lambert and Amy Phillips which show where continuous or more frequent delivery has been successfully rolled out at New Voice Media and Songkick. The common thread – in both cases the test automation is a development activity.

management, mobile, practices, Testing

I’ll Be a Panelist at the Next Generation Testing Conference on 6th December

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I’m excited to be able to announce that I’ll be a panelist at the Next Generation Testing Conference which is on Thursday 6th December in London.

The conference is in its seventh year and is continuing with the  format that was trialed at the last conference in May, with more emphasis on panels and discussions, together with case studies. This should hopefully mean that there’s some great audience participation and discussion on software testing.

I’ll be on two different panels during the day – “Retrospective on 2012” and “Looking Forward to 2013” We’ll be debating various topics including:

  • What have we learned in 2012?
  • TestDevOps – what does it mean to you?
  • Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery – lessons learned
  • Mind Map techniques that work with Agile
  • Advances in risk-based testing
  • Changes in approach for testing cloud based solutions and mobile applications
  • The rise of TestOps
  • Innovation/renovation
  • What is the next big thing?
  • “Prespective” of 2013

Others presenting or as panelists at the event include Paul Gerrard, Julian Harty, Steve Tulk and Niels Malotaux.

It’s sure to be a great event, as the last one was. Hope to see you there. You can find out more about the event at http://next-generation-testing.com/

blog, Experiences, management, practices, Testing

A Testers Hierarchy of Needs

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As part of my role I manage testers and also those involved in delivery operations. This means thinking not only about testing and test techniques, but also about person management, and the tools and techniques that a good manager uses in order to have a happy and productive team. These two areas should not, of course, be treated in isolation since, in order to have a successful test team, it’s the managers job to ensure that the two areas fit well together. If this can be done in as seamless as possible a way, maybe even without the team members even being aware of it, then my experience tells me that you can hit that sweet spot where the team is technically excellent as well as being the sort of team that testers want to work in, and are proud to work in.

I’ve studied a lot of theories of management in the past but the one that I keep coming back to again and again is Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. At it’s simplest it seeks to explain the needs of human’s in their most basic form, expressed hierarchically in order of those needs.

So, for example, the theory puts forward the hypothesis that it is most important (and therefore at the bottom of the pyramid) that human’s experience a need for food, water, etc. Safety needs come next, followed by a need for belonging, and so on.

As a manager, keeping this simple theory in mind can really help. I’ve found numerous occasions in the past where it has helped me understand team members actions, and to help ensure the team is working effectively together.

But it has also got my thinking about how one might go about applying Maslow’s Theory of Needs to Testing. More specifically, how a tester in a team or project might experience and visualise those needs, as reflected by their status within the team. This lead me to produce this:

Testers Hierarchy of Needs

Test Mastery is a place I see the respected, happy tester sitting. Probably people like you, who interact and are involved with the software testing community, who self-learn and who are able to articulate the need for testing effectively.

This is just the start of the theory. I’m sure, as a community we can add more to this. What would you add to the different levels and why? Leave a comment below.

 

 

"ministry of testing", "rapid software testing", blog, Experiences, Exploratory Testing, practices, Testing

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.

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

"ministry of testing", "rapid software testing", blog, goals, plans, practices

Little and Often

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New Year brings new beginnings, new starts, new ideas and for some New Year’s resolutions. I’ve been reading, with a lot of interest, zenhabits.net recently and the post How to Have the Best Year of Your Life (without Setting a Single Goal) particularly caught my eye. do we set ourselves too many goals and resolutions, and are they ultimately doomed to fail?

With that in mind, here’s my plan for this year, sorry, I mean here are some practices 🙂 I intend to engage in through the year which I hope will help me and others.

  • Blog little and blog often: Easy to say of course but more difficult to do. But often you spend too much time thinking about what to say and the moment is wasted. So I intend to start practicing regular blogging, but posts will be shorter. Not as short as my posts on Twitter but a little shorter than last years more lengthy ones.
  • Get back to getting my hands dirty: It’s time to start doing some testing again and not just managing and talking about it. This really is a practice not a goal, becoming part of my DNA again. As a start I’ve signed up for James Bach’s excellent Rapid Software Testing class which The Ministry of Testing are bringing to the UK this year. Can’t wait 🙂
  • Widen my circle of contacts: Obvious really, I’d like to learn more from others outside of my regular circle of contacts. Do you want to talk about something or help me out?
  • Practice generosity: Directly from zenhabits and I’m not ashamed to say. It’ll all be a bit better if we help each other out. What can I help you with? (I know a fair bit about software testing and test management, and too much about cycling :).

What will you do this year?