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

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Can Code, Can't Code, Is Useful

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ChatGPTesters

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Vanilla Flavour Testing

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Build Quality

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Postman Curlections

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Express, Listen, and Field

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