Skip to main content

Dishing the Dirt


The four presentations at CEWT #7 were on the topic of Dirty Testing Secrets. Here's my brief summary.

According to Karo Stoltzenburg, we testers have a bad case of hubris about the uniqueness and value of our work. Not to put too fine a point on it, half of what we do is pointless and in any case could be done by someone else. Testers, she says, pride themselves on questioning, communicating and facilitating communication, and finding the important bugs but really they should find a bit of time to take a long, hard look at themselves.

Questions? She's heard better from developers, subject matter experts, product owners. Testers have no monopoly on critical thinking and people in other roles have information and experience to bring to the table that testers often won't. Communication? Sure, it's common for testers to bring people together but we're also often then an extra node in the information flow network, a contributor to the cacophony of Chinese whispers rattling round any org. And bugs? Pah, who cares that there's 37 different edge cases three levels down in some barely used dialog? Great creativity on your colour-coded mind map of a zillion test cases, oh wise testing master, but which paths through the product do users actually care about?

The resulting discussion ranged wide, covering the value of connecting other people and then perhaps dropping out, the need to keep at least one eye on the big picture, exploratory testing as a core skill of testers, not blocking others from testing, the trade off between reporting all the things and not reporting something that turns out important, teams owning quality, and the outcome for the customer being paramount. (Blog post.)

There's a famous quote in marketing, attributed to John Wannamaker: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half."  How could we know in advance which half of the testing not to do? I asked a similar question a few years ago: testing can’t find all the bugs, so which ones shouldn’t we look for?

You can't get to know what testing is without doing it. That's the dirty secret at the heart of Sime Simic's talk. A tester new to testing starts from a very low base, with many questions to answer about the product, the environment, the company, the users, the sales proposition, their team ... and themselves. The irony is that an experienced tester on a new project, or product, or moving to a new company has many of the same questions.

Sure, the old hand will have some experience, but they also have the extra layer of complication that they don't know which pieces of that are relevant to the new role. How can a tester get credibility and respect, learn to trade cost and value, be efficient, be effective? Only by doing and reflecting, and not rushing to get there.

Again, the conversation flowed, this time passing through getting feedback to understand how others see you and your work, building relationships with developers (particularly), the need to raise interesting things to people who matter, outcomes rather than outputs in spite of pressure to produce the latter, using the flexibility that the tester role permits to go to where the value can be found, and the granularity effect on value: how high value to a company can be low to a team or an individual.

Mark Bunce's experience report described joining a project to implement crucial business logic with a mixture of rule-based and machine learning technology. When Mark came on board the system was biased in favour of the machine learning component and performance, in terms of both accuracy and speed, was poor. There were no testers.

He built up a test team and broke down the work the system was doing to see just where the machine learning was actually adding value and where rules could do better. Testers are certainly not the only people who can apply critical thinking, but they sure helped on this project where performance is now dramatically better and the proportion of logic implemented by machine learning is dramatically lower.

After Mark's talk we dove into details of the particular system and the crude but effective statistical analysis that helped to show where the holes were. We wondered about the quantity and representativeness of the test data sets used to exercise systems like this. Random selections of deidentified production data is good, but can't be the whole story; people still need to look at the system and the outputs it produces. Another interesting angle was the ethical question of getting subject matter experts to train a machine learning system that is designed to replace them. What motivation do they have to help it to do a good job?

My own talk is written up in We Don't Know?

Comments

Robert Day said…
I commented on Karo's own blog:

Yes, all the good things you describe testers doing could be done elsewhere, and by other people, But those things are not usually on those people’s job descriptions. For devs, and product owners, designers and other stakeholders, asking the questions you’ve described fall into the “nice to have” category.

And for every time they ask the question, there may well be five or ten occasions when they don’t, because “I’ll do it later” or “I have more important things to do right now” or “But that’ll delay deployment” or “I’ll look silly if I ask that”.

And so that’s why we have testers. Testers are there to ask the difficult questions. They don’t have anything more important to do right now. They’d rather defer deployment than release something they know hasn’t been adequately tested. And they don’t care abut looking silly to colleagues.

And it’s better that testers ask these questions than you come to a point where the CEO stands up in the Board, waving a newspaper with a damaging 24-point headline about your product, and they ask this question: “Why wasn’t this found in testing?”
James Thomas said…
Thanks, Robert. I'll look forward to Karo's reply over on her blog. For me, I think, asking the question about the value of testing in the way Karo did is interesting. It can provoke us into thinking about what we do, what constraints we accept, and why.

I had a similar experience on a similar topic here: #GoTesting

Popular posts from this blog

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...