Why Not a Testing Standard?

The Cambridge Tester Meetup last night was a discussion on testing standards. Not on the specific question of ISO 29119 (for which see Huib Schoots' excellent resource) but more generally on the possibility of there being a standard at all. It was structured along the lines of Lean Coffee with thoughts and questions being thrown down on post-its and then grouped together for brief discussion.

I've recorded the content of the stickies here with just a little post-hoc editing to remove some duplication or occasionally disambiguate. The titles were just handles to attach stickies to once we had a few in an area and I haven't tried to rationalise them or rearrange the content.

Enhance/Inhibit Testing

Testing is a creative process so can't be standardised.
Testing doesn't fit into a standard format, so how can there be a standard for it? (Do we mean "good testing" whatever that is?)
New tools, technology might not fit into a standard.
Standardisation destroys great design ideas by encouraging/forcing overly broad application.
Can a general standard really fit specific project constraints?
Each tester is different.
A standard limits new thinking.
Could a standard be simply "Do the best you can in the time you have"?

Who Benefits?

Who do certifications serve anyway? What do they want from them?
As litigation becomes more prevalent who is protected by a standard? Customers, producers, users?
With a standard, companies can be "trusted" (QA-approved sticker).
People outside of test are usually very opinionated. Do standards help or hinder?
End users care because of the possible added costs.
A testing standard would provide false reassurance for companies.

Communication

How does an agile team fit in the standard?
Too much documentation? Standards may cause the need for more documentation to show compliance.
Standard language for communicating test ideas.
Divide the testing community - good or bad?
Respond to feedback and criticism.

How Much? or Alternatives

Do we need an alternative at all?
Where are the standards for science, consultancy, product management, development?
Use as much or as little of a standards as needed?
Could a standard be subjective?
Standards for products, or the process of creating products?
What else do we need or want instead?
Could a standard cover the minimum at least?
A standard should be flexible to adapt to project constraints.

Useful Subsets

Can a single standard fit different products? (Angry Birds vs nuclear reactor).
Uniformisation of some testing (bring up the baseline).
There are already some government standards.
Infinite space of testing. Can a standard capture that?
Can some aspects of testing be covered by standards? If so, which?

Can't we Just Explore?

Scientists do. Why can't we? (But what about mandated science?)
Approaches in methodologies used set out in a common understood format could help consistency.

Fear of Being Assessed?

Are testers just scared of being evaluated or taking responsibility?
I'm too shy.
Could it open up law suites, blame and other consequences?
Should you insure yourself or your company against any not conforming to the standard?
Anything unstructured used as an addition to, rather than part of, the primary approach. Stops people hiding?

Show Me the Money?

What is the motivation of those seeking to create certification? (Rent-seekers?)
It's just to make money for ISO companies.
Adds organisation to a "messy" activity.

Certify Testers Not Testing

Can you differentiate certifications for testers from certifications for pieces of work? (c.f. Kaner)
Can you say "product tester by a tester certified XYZ"?
How would recruitment distinguish between testers and checkers?
An independent body to audit the testing/tester on real project work? (Who audits the auditor?)
Qualification vs certification vs standardisation.

Standards in Other Industries

Learn more about standards in other industries and how they dealt with their first standard.
Standards in e.g. car safety are on the result of the work not the methodology?
Universities and schools start teaching testing. Should they teach about the standards?
Standards to help produce evidence of testing not just test plans, which are usually fiction.
"Informed" standards (courses, talks etc), "in-house" standards?

Misc

Are objections to certification objections to theoretical risks but in practice it's possible to have something good enough?
Would companies without testers need a testing standard?
Development standards to be closely linked to testing standards.
Easy to find jobs abroad (if there were standardisation).
A standard would be good as a product.
Would a standard really impact our day-to-day job?
Is the standard simply a reason to justify testing?
Is the idea of a standard predicated on an outdated idea of testing?

As you can see there was no shortage of ground to cover but, with only a couple of hours, plenty was necessarily shallow or not dug into at all.

To pull out a handful of points that I found particularly interesting: we were not shy about asking questions and we were prepared to aim them at ourselves; we bumped into the distinction between certifying product, tester and testing multiple times; we didn't really explore what we meant by standards, certification and qualification and what the differences between them might be; while the discussion was entered into with an open mind (which was the remit) there were sometimes implicit assumptions about what a standard must entail (inflexibility; lots of documentation etc) which were mostly negative and where positives were proposed they tended to be viewed more as possibilities.

P.S. There's a few photos.
Image: https://flic.kr/p/7rddEr

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 answ...

How do I Test AI?

Recently a few people have asked me how I test AI. I'm happy to share my experiences, but I frame the question more broadly, perhaps something like this: what kinds of things do I consider when testing systems with artificial intelligence components . I freestyled liberally the first time I answered but when the question came up again I thought I'd write a few bullets to help me remember key things. This post is the latest iteration of that list. Caveats: I'm not an expert; what you see below is a reminder of things to pick up on during conversations so it's quite minimal; it's also messy; it's absolutely not a guide or a set of best practices; each point should be applied in context; the categories are very rough; it's certainly not complete. Also note that I work with teams who really know what they're doing on the domain, tech, and medical safety fronts and some of the things listed here are things they'd typically do some or all of. Testing ...

The Best Programmer Dan Knows

I was pairing with my friend Vernon at work last week, on a tool I've been developing. He was smiling broadly as I talked him through what I'd done because we've been here before. The tool facilitates a task that's time-consuming, inefficient, error-prone, tiresome, and important to get right. Vern knows that those kinds of factors trigger me to change or build something, and that's why he was struggling not to laugh out loud. He held himself together and asked a bunch of sensible questions about the need, the desired outcome, and the approach I'd taken. Then he mentioned a talk by Daniel Terhorst-North, called The Best Programmer I Know, and said that much of it paralleled what he sees me doing. It was my turn to laugh then, because I am not a good programmer, and I thought he knew that already. What I do accept, though, is that I am focussed on the value that programs can give, and getting some of that value as early as possible. He sent me a link to the ta...

Notes on Testing Notes

Ben Dowen pinged me and others on Twitter last week , asking for "a nice concise resource to link to for a blog post - about taking good Testing notes." I didn't have one so I thought I'd write a few words on how I'm doing it at the moment for my work at Ada Health, alongside Ben. You may have read previously that I use a script to upload Markdown-based text files to Confluence . Here's the template that I start from: # Date + Title # Mission # Summary WIP! # Notes Then I fill out what I plan to do. The Mission can be as high or low level as I want it to be. Sometimes, if deeper context might be valuable I'll add a Background subsection to it. I don't fill in the Summary section until the end. It's a high-level overview of what I did, what I found, risks identified, value provided, and so on. Between the Mission and Summary I hope that a reader can see what I initially intended and what actually...

On Herding Cats

Last night I was at the Cambridge Tester meetup for a workshop on leadership. It was a two-parter with Drew Pontikis facilitating conversation about workplace scenarios followed by an AMA with a group of experienced managers. I can't come to work this week, my cat died. Drew opened by asking us what our first thoughts would be as managers on seeing that sentence. Naturally, sadness and sympathy, followed by a week ? for a cat ? and I only got a day for my gran! Then practicalities such as maybe there's company policy that covers that , and then the acknowledgement that it's contextual: perhaps this was a long-time emotional support animal . Having established that management decisions are a mixture of emotion, logic, and contingency Drew noted that most of us don't get training in management or leadership then split us into small groups and confronted us with three situations to talk through: Setting personal development goals for others. Dropping a clange...

Reasonable Doubt

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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...

Why Test, Test What, Then How?

There was a time when testing was all about the mnemonics . Well, we had no AI back then so thinking about our human craft and how to share what we had learned using our human intelligence with other engaged humans for later recall in their human heads seemed important. But this post isn't about dumping on AI. It isn't about mnemonics either even if WTTWTH does look like something that'd fit well into that ancient world. No, this post is just a snappier version of what I said to my team this week when I was walking through some testing I'd done the day before. It was concerned with a change to a particular turn in the dialog system we're building where multiple variables are in play, some populated by an external call to an LLM service. I wanted to make the point that the bulk of the testing work was done in the research I did and the spreadsheet I made, not in the interaction with our product. That spreadsheet was the result of me looking in our service's cod...

Open Your Mind

Jerome Groopman, in How Doctors Think , reviews ways in which doctors can make poor choices, identifies potential causes, and suggests some practices, for both doctor and patient, that can help to prevent them. I find this interesting for a couple of reasons: first, I work in the health space, although not in a therapeutic area and, second, I like to reflect on my own thought processes. I'll take three broad themes from Groopman's analysis: the business of healthcare and how that impacts a physician's ability to practice; the doctor-patient relationship and how that impacts the experience of both sides; and the cognitive failings that impact a correct and timely diagnosis for any given patient. Naturally, these overlap. The book is written from the perspective of the notoriously commercialised American medical system and is around 20 years old, so doubtless some of the details are different outside of the US and have changed since pu...

Better Isolate Than Never

How do you test a product with distributed logic and non-deterministic components? Well, it depends on the product and when the question is asked. This post is one answer, for now. A service I work on exposes an API for internal and external clients and calls multiple other services. It orchestrates a reasonably complex journey for a user, with their inputs and the responses of the services determining each step. Our customers can configure the service to provide a variant of the standard journey for their users. This gives them choices on the available steps, the order of the steps, and, importantly, some of the logic for taking particular steps. This configuration lives in a different repository to the service, not owned by us, and it can be changed and deployed independently from the service. As you can imagine, we test our service in multiple ways at different granularities using the usual tooling, including unit tests fo...

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