Skip to main content

Cambridge Lean Coffee


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

How to get work in testing having been a developer for 25 years?

  • The questioner is an experienced developer/consultant who consistently sees "poor quality" development.
  • You don't need a formal background; it's possible to learn testing on the job.
  • The job market seems to be about 'technical testers' these days, so a developer could be suited to it.
  • Are you applying for roles and being rejected. (Not yet; this is a recent idea.)
  • What do you mean by testing? ("Separation of concerns, loose coupling, SOLID, good requirements. Unit testing is just there for the taking ... you just do it.")
  • They sound like full life-cycle or architectural ideas that might enable testing or reduce the need for it? ("Yes.")
  • Think about what motivates the person you're pitching to. What do they care about? Ask what they're worried about, the risks they perceive.
  • Testing is a stigma for some people.
  • Perhaps don't try to sell testing, so much as the value that testing can bring.
  • Testing for its own sake is tedious.
  • What is the context that you're trying to sell testing into?
  • In some cases, testing might be the wrong thing to suggest. For example a startup might need to move fast to get to market.
  • Remember that it doesn't matter how valuable testing is to you, the key is how valuable it is to them.

Test Managers must have been testers.

  • Are we talking about technical management or line management? (The questioner was more interested in line management.)
  • Other things being equal, I'd rather have a good people manager than a tester as a manager.
  • Testers will benefit from access to someone with technical knowledge, if not their manager.
  • A good manager can give the value proposition from the company perspective. Someone focused on testing might not do that so well.
  • A good line manager understands your needs and helps you through challenges in all areas (not just your discipline).
  • A non-testing manager can offer a useful alternative perspective, force you to speak in plain language.
  • A non-testing manager might not understand the value that you've given on projects (and does salary review, appraisal etc) but a good manager will ask relevant people for that feedback.
  • What's the best thing a manager has done/does for you?
  • ... (non-tester) pushed me to develop myself; in particular he saw that I could benefit from public speaking experience.
  • ... (non-tester) trusts me to get on with stuff - but asks me hard questions
  • ... (tester) supported me; gave me time to learn
  • ... (tester) defended me from company crap and allowed me to do good work that needed doing
  • Can we differentiate people who see value in testing and in testers?
  • Line management is about people not activities.

How detailed should exploratory testing be?

  • The questioner has been accused of going "too deep" when testing, after finding bugs outside the mission scope.
  • ET is about learning the product; about iterating, debriefing and focusing.
  • Look at Explore It!
  • Sometimes the mission is "I just want you to check the feature".
  • Sometimes people don't want to hear about bugs because they might e.g. stop the product shipping.
  • Sometimes people assume that "I found a bug" means "you must fix the bug I found".
  • Are there other things that you could have done that would have been more valuable?
  • What did your accusers expect from you?
Edit: Katrina Clokie followed up on this question in The Testing Pendulum: Finding balance in exploration.

We can't find all the bugs, so which ones shouldn't we look for? How?

  • Think about the cost to the organisation if an issue comes to light. What do the stakeholders care about?
  • Quality is in the eye of the stakeholder.
  • Don't look for the bugs that the customer is likely to find.
  • You shouldn't look for the cases that aren't important.
  • Is that very practical advice? How do you know?
  • Yes, it is practical advice, it can force you to think about or find out which are the important cases.
  • ... for example, performance is not important, so we won't look for bugs there.
  • ... which isn't to say we won't find them in passing, of course.
  • But testing is a way to uncover the things that are important.
  • ... ideally it will be a continual dialogue with stakeholders which focuses the investigation.
  • If you're not going to do anything with the information, then don't look for it. There's no value in reporting if no action will result.
  • But sometimes the aggregation of bugs in an area is itself significant, e.g. one typo on a page vs 300 typos on every page.
  • That's an interesting negative ("shouldn't") because normally we focus on the things we are doing or should do.
  • Isn't the premise here questionable? Do testers really generally go out looking for specific bugs?
  • Perhaps testers will be focusing more on the areas of potential risk and ways in which those risks might be exposed?
  • But you might know of, say, a repeated anti-pattern within the development team that you would look for explicitly.
Edit: Me and Anders Dinsen followed up this question in What We Found Not Looking for Bugs.

Comments

  1. Thank you for posting these notes! And hello! I'm T.J. Maher, a new co-organizer for the newly rebranded Ministry of Testing: Boston Meetup .

    I've explored a bit about the Ministry of Testing after first hearing Rosie Sherry's interview with TestTalks.com. I love the Software Testing Club blogs, contributing a few articles here and there. And I love the Testing Feeds! I really feel connected to the software testing community as a whole, keeping up with them. And I really love the wonderful ideas Ministry of Testing has, such as #30DaysOfTesting!

    When you talk about a "Lean Coffee", is it like this? https://www.retrium.com/resources/techniques/lean-coffee

    ... if so, this is an idea I may want to steal! ... What is the maximum size you have for your groups?

    Pleasure virtually meeting you!

    -T.J. Maher
    http://www.tjmaher.com/

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi TJ,

    Yeah, that's the kind of thing. We typically have one hour total - the meeting is before work in the morning - and so the setup timings are more compressed.

    We also timebox the discussions at 8 minutes followed by a vote to continue or not. If we choose to carry on then a further 4 minutes, vote, 2 minutes.

    See e.g. http://agilecoffee.com/leancoffee/

    We typically try to keep groups to around six people, so we run several groups at each meetup.

    Hope that's helpful.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

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