Skip to main content

Cambridge Lean Coffee


This month's Lean Coffee was hosted by Abcam. Here's some brief, aggregated comments and questions  on topics covered by the group I was in.

Suggest techniques for identifying and managing risk on an integration project.

  • Consider the risk in your product, risk in third-party products, risk in the integration
  • Consider what kinds of risk your stakeholders care about; and to who (e.g. risk to the bottom line, customer data, sales, team morale ...)
  • ... your risk-assessment and mitigation strategies may be different for each
  • Consider mitigating risk in your own product, or in those you are integrating with
  • Consider hazards and harms
  • Hazards are things that pose some kind of risk (objects and behaviours, e.g. a delete button, and corruption of database)
  • Harms are the effects those hazards might have (e.g. deleting unexpected content, and serving incomplete results)
  • Consider probabilities and impacts of each harm, to provide a way to compare them
  • Advocate for the resources that you think you need 
  • ... and explain what you won't (be able to) do without them
  • Take a bigger view than a single tester alone can provide
  • ... perhaps something like the Three Amigos (and other stakeholders)
  • Consider what you can do in future to mitigate these kinds of risks earlier
  • Categorise the issues you've found already; they are evidence for areas of the product that may be riskier
  • ... or might show that your test strategy is biased
  • Remember that the stuff you don't know you don't know is a potential risk too: should you ask for time to investigate that?

Didn't get time to discuss some of my own interests: How-abouts and What-ifs, and Not Sure About Uncertainty.

Can templates be used to generate tests?

  • Some programming languages have templates for generating code 
  • ... can the same idea apply to tests?
  • The aim is to code tests faster; there is a lot of boilerplate code (in the project being discussed)
  • How would a template know what the inputs and expectations are?
  • Automation is checking rather than testing
  • Consider data-driven testing and QuickCheck
  • Consider asking for testability in the product to make writing test code easier (if you are spending time reverse-engineering the product in order to test it)
  • ... e.g. ask for consistent Ids of objects in and across web pages
  • Could this (perceived) problem be alleviated by factoring out the boilerplate code?

How can the coverage of manual and automated testing be compared?

  • Code coverage tools could, in principle, give some idea of coverage
  • ... but they have known drawbacks
  • ... and it might be hard to tie particular tester activity to particular paths through the code to understand where overlap exists
  • Tagging test cases with e.g. story identifiers can help to track where coverage has been added (but not what the coverage is)
  • What do we really mean by coverage?
  • What's the purpose of the exercise? To retire manual tests?
  • One participant is trying to switch to test automation for regression testing
  • ... but finding it hard to have confidence in the automation
  • ... because of the things that testers can naturally see around whatever they are looking at, that the automation does not give

What are the pros and cons of being the sole tester on a project?

  • Chance to take responsibility, build experience ... but can be challenging if the tester is not ready for that
  • Chance to make processes etc that works for you ... but perhaps there are efficiencies in sharing process too
  • Chance to own your work ... but miss out on other perspectives
  • Chance to express yourself ... but can feel lonely
  • Could try all testers on all projects (e.g. to help when people are on holiday or sick)
  • ... but this is potentially expensive and people complain about being thinly sliced
  • Could try sharing testing across the project team (if an issue is that there's insufficient resource for the testing planned)
  • Could set up sharing structures, e.g. team standup, peer reviews/debriefs, or pair testing across projects

What do (these) testers want from a test manager?

  • Clear product strategy
  • As much certainty as possible
  • Allow and encourage learning
  • Allow and encourage contact with testers from outside the organisation
  • Recognition that testers are different and have different needs
  • Be approachable
  • Give advice based on experience
  • Work with the tester 
  • ... e.g. coaching, debriefing, pointing out potential efficiency, productivity, testing improvements
  • Show appreciation
  • Must have been a tester
Image: https://flic.kr/p/bumiPG

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Can Code, Can't Code, Is Useful

The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book,  Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide  responses to common questions and statements about testing from a  context-driven perspective . It's being edited by  Lee Hawkins  who is  posing questions on  Twitter ,   LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST  mailing list  and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to  contribute  by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me?   --00-- "If testers can’t code, they’re of no use to us" My first reaction is to wonder what you expect from your testers. I am immediately interested in your working context and the way

Meet Me Halfway?

  The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book,  Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide  responses to common questions and statements about testing from a  context-driven perspective . It's being edited by  Lee Hawkins  who is  posing questions on  Twitter ,   LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST  mailing list  and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to  contribute  by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me?   --00-- "Stop answering my questions with questions." Sure, I can do that. In return, please stop asking me questions so open to interpretation that any answer would be almost meaningless and certa

Not Strictly for the Birds

  One of my chores takes me outside early in the morning and, if I time it right, I get to hear a charming chorus of birdsong from the trees in the gardens down our road, a relaxing layered soundscape of tuneful calls, chatter, and chirrupping. Interestingly, although I can tell from the number and variety of trills that there must be a large number of birds around, they are tricky to spot. I have found that by staring loosely at something, such as the silhouette of a tree's crown against the slowly brightening sky, I see more birds out of the corner of my eye than if I scan to look for them. The reason seems to be that my peripheral vision picks up movement against the wider background that direct inspection can miss. An optometrist I am not, but I do find myself staring at data a great deal, seeking relationships, patterns, or gaps. I idly wondered whether, if I filled my visual field with data, I might be able to exploit my peripheral vision in that quest. I have a wide monito

Testing (AI) is Testing

Last November I gave a talk, Random Exploration of a Chatbot API , at the BCS Testing, Diversity, AI Conference .  It was a nice surprise afterwards to be offered a book from their catalogue and I chose Artificial Intelligence and Software Testing by Rex Black, James Davenport, Joanna Olszewska, Jeremias Rößler, Adam Leon Smith, and Jonathon Wright.  This week, on a couple of train journeys around East Anglia, I read it and made sketchnotes. As someone not deeply into this field, but who has been experimenting with AI as a testing tool at work, I found the landscape view provided by the book interesting, particularly the lists: of challenges in testing AI, of approaches to testing AI, and of quality aspects to consider when evaluating AI.  Despite the hype around the area right now there's much that any competent tester will be familiar with, and skills that translate directly. Where there's likely to be novelty is in the technology, and the technical domain, and the effect of

Postman Curlections

My team has been building a new service over the last few months. Until recently all the data it needs has been ingested at startup and our focus has been on the logic that processes the data, architecture, and infrastructure. This week we introduced a couple of new endpoints that enable the creation (through an HTTP POST) and update (PUT) of the fundamental data type (we call it a definition ) that the service operates on. I picked up the task of smoke testing the first implementations. I started out by asking the system under test to show me what it can do by using Postman to submit requests and inspecting the results. It was the kinds of things you'd imagine, including: submit some definitions (of various structure, size, intent, name, identifiers, etc) resubmit the same definitions (identical, sharing keys, with variations, etc) retrieve the submitted definitions (using whatever endpoints exist to show some view of them) compare definitions I submitted fro

Testers are Gate-Crashers

  The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book,  Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide  responses to common questions and statements about testing from a  context-driven perspective . It's being edited by  Lee Hawkins  who is  posing questions on  Twitter ,   LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST  mailing list  and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to  contribute  by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me?   --00-- "Testers are the gatekeepers of quality" Instinctively I don't like the sound of that, but I wonder what you mean by it. Perhaps one or more of these? Testers set the quality sta

Vanilla Flavour Testing

I have been pairing with a new developer colleague recently. In our last session he asked me "is this normal testing?" saying that he'd never seen anything like it anywhere else that he'd worked. We finished the task we were on and then chatted about his question for a few minutes. This is a short summary of what I said. I would describe myself as context-driven . I don't take the same approach to testing every time, except in a meta way. I try to understand the important questions, who they are important to, and what the constraints on the work are. With that knowledge I look for productive, pragmatic, ways to explore whatever we're looking at to uncover valuable information or find a way to move on. I write test notes as I work in a format that I have found to be useful to me, colleagues, and stakeholders. For me, the notes should clearly state the mission and give a tl;dr summary of the findings and I like them to be public while I'm working not just w

Build Quality

  The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book,  Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide  responses to common questions and statements about testing from a  context-driven perspective . It's being edited by  Lee Hawkins  who is  posing questions on  Twitter ,   LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST  mailing list  and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to  contribute  by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me?   --00-- "When the build is green, the product is of sufficient quality to release" An interesting take, and one I wouldn't agree with in general. That surprises you? Well, ho

Make, Fix, and Test

A few weeks ago, in A Good Tester is All Over the Place , Joep Schuurkes described a model of testing work based on three axes: do testing yourself or support testing by others be embedded in a team or be part of a separate team do your job or improve the system It resonated with me and the other testers I shared it with at work, and it resurfaced in my mind while I was reflecting on some of the tasks I've picked up recently and what they have involved, at least in the way I've chosen to address them. Here's three examples: Documentation Generation We have an internal tool that generates documentation in Confluence by extracting and combining images and text from a handful of sources. Although useful, it ran very slowly or not at all so one of the developers performed major surgery on it. Up to that point, I had never taken much interest in the tool and I could have safely ignored this piece of work too because it would have been tested by

The Best Laid Test Plans

The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book,  Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide  responses to common questions and statements about testing from a  context-driven perspective . It's being edited by  Lee Hawkins  who is  posing questions on  Twitter ,   LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST  mailing list  and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to  contribute  by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me?   --00-- "What's the best format for a test plan?" I'll side-step the conversation about what a test plan is and just say that the format you should use is one that works for you, your coll