Cambridge Lean Coffee

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

If we don't do testing, what do we replace it with?

We move test environment and tooling into Dev.
But practically, how do you ensure the customer gets the right thing?
Testing vs checking: testers need to exist.
Perhaps the tester just becomes an advisor?
With more ability to push into production more often and roll back if there's a problem, there can be less testing.
Even if testing is done elsewhere (by developers or customers) we still need someone to ask pertinent questions about the product, to evaluate risks.
And where is the test manager?
The test manager is taking a more strategic view, coaching, keeping people aligned, across products and projects.
Testing is being pushed left (into Dev) and pushed right (into production) and up (into the business).
Then what would be down?
Why do we need test managers? Why not just engineering managers?
Managers with relevant technical skills are respected by staff.

Formal test plans. How can they help in coordinating phases or levels of development?

A fair analogy to the questioner's context might be coordination between teams building layers of unit tests, integration tests, end-to-end tests.
How do you get the right amount of co-ordination between the different phases?
How can you compare the coverage in each phase?
Can a formal test plan (whatever that is) be a way to begin to share what's done in each phase?
... and make it consistent across releases?
Talk to people!
Consider checklists over something heavyweight.
What problem are you trying to solve here?
A perception that there is repeated work in phases, and that this impedes delivery to market.
Are you concerned that there might be testing that no-one is doing?
Oops.
Can all phases work in one environment so that more can be shared?
Is there a way to instrument environments to tell what of the product functionality is being exercised in each environment?
... perhaps something like code coverage metrics in software?

What are you reading? Has it helped you? How?

Conceptual Blockbusting by James L Adams.
... it identifies ways in which creativity is blocked
... and it suggests techniques for overcoming them
... which I find valuable as I view testing as inherently creative.
Podcasts more than reading at the moment
... because I can do them at the same time as something else
... topics include culture, science, testing, mental health, sports
... and I find I can draw parallels to my work.
Coaching Agile Teams by Lyssa Adkins
... right now, I'm re-reading the section on conflict resolution
... because it's relevant to my work situation.

Image: https://stocksnap.io/photo/Y6JIZQC96J

Comments

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Can Code, Can't Code, Is Useful

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The Best Programmer Dan Knows

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Not Strictly for the Birds

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Don't Know? Find Out!

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ChatGPTesters

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Express, Listen, and Field

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Software Sisyphus

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-- "How can I possibly test 'all the stuff' every iteration?" Whoa! There's a lot to unpack there, so let me break it down a little: who is suggesting that "al...

Hiccupps

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