Context-Driven, or What?

I was interviewed on Testers' Island Discs a few months ago. During the conversation, Mark Winteringham asked me about the Association for Software Testing and I said this:

The AST is a professional body for software testers. It's a non-profit — we're all volunteers — and its mission is to advance understanding of the science and practice of software testing according to context-driven principles ... which sounds like a real mouthful.

The way I like to gloss it, and the way it speaks to me, is that we value both expertise and experience when it comes to testing and generally speaking we favour context-driven testing too.

My sense is that, these days, most people would, even if they don't really know the terms, probably be doing some kind of context-driven testing. The proportion of people doing old-school stuff, test cases and so on, is shrinking as far as I can see.

I love talking about AST (why not come and join us?) and I very am happy with the way I interpret our mission as being about valuing expertise and experience ... but the way I referred to context-driven testing has been nagging away at me.

Why? Because I talked about "some kind of context-driven testing ..." as if there are flavours, and contrasted it with up-front test cases as if that's all it is.

What we say in the moment often isn't the optimal way we could express ourselves and I'm not vain enough to think that anyone listening was hanging on my every syllable in any case. However, I am interested in reflecting on what I said to better internalise what I think and make it more natural for me to say it concisely and accurately next time.

So, let's start at context-driven-testing.com. It describes the set of principles that underpin the Association for Software Testing's mission:

The value of any practice depends on its context.
There are good practices in context, but there are no best practices.
People, working together, are the most important part of any project’s context.
Projects unfold over time in ways that are often not predictable.
The product is a solution. If the problem isn’t solved, the product doesn’t work.
Good software testing is a challenging intellectual process.
Only through judgment and skill, exercised cooperatively throughout the entire project, are we able to do the right things at the right times to effectively test our products.

These are opinionated principles, for sure, but they are principles that I can sign up to.

The rest of context-driven-testing.com attempts to carve out a space in which context-driven testing is distinguished from testing where context is somehow considered, testing where context is not considered, agile testing, and even exploratory testing.

I am not under any illusions that being driven by context is any guarantee of good testing, or of consistent testing. There just isn't "the context" but instead "the contexts." Every person in a situation has their own take on what they see and hear at any given time, some parts shared with others and some not. The method of observing, the observations, and the tester's biases of interpretation will all contribute to determining any resulting actions.

On top of that, even for a given person with their own context, it's not possible to consider the whole context the whole time. Where are the edges of a context? How to know that the relevant context has been included and irrelevant context excluded? How to track when the context changes in a significant way?

Testers who are taking a context-driven approach will recognise these problems and try to balance them by, for instance, repeated observation, applying heuristics, finding similar examples from their experience, calling on their expertise, looking for collaboration, making regular attempts to synchronise with the people who matter on the project, and aligning work with current goals and constraints.

It's not a thought that I've had before, but I have the feeling that I have wrappd up context-driven approaches with being congruent. In congruent communication I want to make sure that I give fair consideration to myself, the other parties, and the wider situation. That's how I approach testing too. That's how I try to approach pretty much everything that matters to me.

I have also just noticed that I didn't use the term context-driven in my recent How To Test Anything talk even though I would readily describe the values it put forward and the approaches it described as context-driven.

What's that about, then? Good question. My immediate reaction is that I'm wary of labels and the preconceptions that go with them. There are so many X-driven-Y approaches these days, for example. That's a shame because context-driven, for me, provides scaffolding to stand on, not a stick to be beaten with.

My second reaction is that I'm unwittingly precious about the term and what it represents and that I don't want to dignify testing that doesn't deserve to be called context-driven by suggesting that it is.

Back to Testers' Island Discs, then. When I said "most people will be doing some kind of context-driven testing ..." I think what I really wanted to say was something like "most people will be setting up their testing to take context into account rather than, for example, simply starting with a big set of test cases that they've derived from the requirements."

Which is all well and good yada yada blah blah blah semantics, you might say. Fair enough, but understanding what I think helps me to guide how I act and I'm very interested in acting in ways that I am comfortable with. This kind of writing helps me to get there.
Image: https://flic.kr/p/tkdaSh

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 ...

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...

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...

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

In Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work Simon Willison writes: As software engineers we ... need to deliver code that works — and we need to include proof that it works as well. He is coming at this from the perspective of LLM-assisted coding, but most of what he says applies in general. I think this is a reasonable consise summary of his requirements for developers: Manual happy paths: get the system into an initial state, exercise the code, check that it has the desired effect on the state. Manual edge cases: no advice given, just a note that skill here is a sign of a senior engineer. Automated tests: should demonstrate the change like Manual happy paths but also fail if the change is reverted. He notes that, even though LLM tooling can write automated tests, it's humans who are accountable for the code and it's on us to "include evidence that it works as it should." Coincidentally, just the week before I read his post I told one of my...

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...

LLEWT 2024

This weekend I was at LLEWT 2024, a peer conference on Anglesey , north Wales, discussing communication. Given the day jobs of the participants, it was no surprise that the experience reports and the conversations that followed them mostly focussed on software development contexts. Notes from my presentation are in Express, Listen, and Field . I made sketchnotes (below) for each presentation and a mindmap (above) to try to summarise the whole. Without much reflection yet, I guess I would pull these common high-level threads from the day: There are multiple reasons that communication fails ... like, duh! ... but having multiple strategies for framing a message can help ... and having multiple tactics for delivering a message can help too. Understanding what you want from an interaction is key ... so setting the context to make that more likely is wise ... which might mean meta-conversation, being transparent, or changing your approach...

Exploratory Testing Reimagined

Maaret Pyhäjärvi gave a talk, Exploratory Testing Reimagined , last week. There's a blog post to go with it, so I won't say much on top of what's in my sketchnotes above, just pull out a few reflections. I don't have the data or wide range of experience reports that Maaret does, but my own anecdotal results from using AI tools for testing align closely with what she says in the talk. I have created skills to assist me, and my colleagues, in our testing work. For example, I used the contents of this blog and five years of test notes in my current role to distil a conversational workflow, facilitated by Claude, which runs through risk identification, test idea generation, and test mission creation. All four skills (the facilitation is its own skill) are backed by a fifth, on general testing theory and practice, and a sixth about how I like to interact with the AI: which notably includes that I want it to be concise, evidence-backed, well-structured, and critical. I st...

Hiccupps

Search This Blog