Cambridge Lean Coffee

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

What is your biggest problem right now? How are you addressing it?

A common answer was managing multi-site test teams (in-house and/or off-shore)
Issues: sharing information, context, emergent specialisations in the teams, communication
Weinberg says all problems are people problems
... but the core people problem is communication
Examples: chinese whispers, lack of information flow, expertise silos, lack of visual cues (e.g. in IM or email)
Exacerbated by time zone and cultural differences; lack/difficulty of ability to sit down together, ...
Trying to set up communities of practice (e.g. Spotify Guilds) to help communication, iron out issues
Team splits tend to be imposed by management
But note that most of the problems can exist in a colocated team too

Another issue was adoption of Agile
Issues: lack of desire to undo silos, too many parallel projects, too little breaking down of tasks, insufficient catering for uncertainty, resources maxed out
People often expect Agile approaches to "speed things up" immediately
On the way to this Lean Coffee I was listening to Lisa Crispin on Test Talks:"you’re going to slow down for quite a long time, but you’re going to build a platform ... that, in the future, will enable you to go faster"

How do you get developers to be open about bugs?

Some developers know about bugs in the codebase but aren't sharing that information.
Example: code reviewer doesn't flag up side-effects of a change in another developer's code
Example: developers get bored of working in an area so move on to something else, leaving unfinished functionality
Example: requirements are poorly defined and there's no appetite to clarify them so code has ambiguous aims
Example: code is built incrementally over time with no common design motivation and becomes shaky
Is there a checklist for code review that both sides can see?
Does bug triage include a risk assessment?
Do we know why the developers aren't motivated to share the information?
Talking to developers, asking to be shown code and talked through algorithms can help
Watching commits go through; looking at the speed of peer review can suggest places where effort was low

Testers should code; coders should test

Discussion was largely about testers in production code
Writing production code (even under guidance in non-critical areas) gives insight into the production
... but perhaps it takes testers away from core skills; those where they add value to the team?
... but perhaps testers need to be wary of not simply reinforcing skills/biases we already have?
Coders do test! Even static code review is testing
Why is coding special? Why shouldn't testers do UX, BA, Marketing, architecting, documentation, ...
Testing is dong other people's jobs
... or is it?
These kinds of discussion seem to be predicated on the idea that manual testing is devalued
Some discussion about whether test code can get worse when developers work on it
... some say that they have never seen that happen
... some say that developers have been seen to deliberately over-complicate such code in order to make it an interesting coding task
... some have seen developers add very poor test data to frameworks
... but surely the same is true of some testers?
We should consider automation as a tool, rather than an all (writing product code) or nothing (manual tester). Use it when it makes sense to, e.g. to generate test data

Ways to convince others that testing is adding value

Difference between being seen as personally valuable against the test team adding value
Overheard: "Testing is necessary waste"
Find issues that your stakeholders care about
... these needn't be in the product, they can be e.g. holes in requirements
... but the stakeholders need to see what the impact of proceeding without addressing the issues could be
Be humble and efficient and professional and consistent and show respect to your colleagues and the project
Make your reporting really solid - what we did (and didn't); what we found; what the value of that work was (and why)
... even when you find no issues

Image: https://flic.kr/p/5LH9o

Comments

Meet Me Halfway?

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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 ...

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...

Beginning Sketchnoting

In September 2017 I attended Ian Johnson 's visual note-taking workshop at DDD East Anglia . For the rest of the day I made sketchnotes, including during Karo Stoltzenburg 's talk on exploratory testing for developers (sketch below), and since then I've been doing it on a regular basis. Karo recently asked whether I'd do a Team Eating (the Linguamatics brown bag lunch thing) on sketchnoting. I did, and this post captures some of what I said. Beginning sketchnoting, then. There's two sides to that: I still regard myself as a beginner at it, and today I'll give you some encouragement and some tips based on my experience, to begin sketchnoting for yourselves. I spend an enormous amount of time in situations where I find it helpful to take notes: testing, talking to colleagues about a problem, reading, 1-1 meetings, project meetings, workshops, conferences, and, and, and, and I could go on. I've long been interested in the approaches I've evol...

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...

ChatGPTesters

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-- "Why don’t we replace the testers with AI?" We have a good relationship so I feel safe telling you that my instinctive reaction, as a member of the T...

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 gener...

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...

Express, Listen, and Field

Last weekend I participated in the LLandegfan Exploratory Workshop on Testing (LLEWT) 2024, a peer conference in a small parish hall on Anglesey, north Wales. The topic was communication and I shared my sketchnotes and a mind map from the day a few days ago. This post summarises my experience report. Express, Listen, and Field Just about the most hands-on, practical, and valuable training I have ever done was on assertiveness with a local Cambridge coach, Laura Dain . In it she introduced Express, Listen, and Field (ELF), distilled from her experience across many years in the women’s movement, business, and academia. ELF: say your key message clearly and calmly, actively listen to the response, and then focus only on what is relevant to your needs. I blogged a little about it back in 2017 and I've been using it ever since. Assertiveness In a previous role, I was the manager of a test team and organised training for the whole ...

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