Hiccupps

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...

Last week I attended a meetup on API testing with Mark Winteringham . In it, he talked through some HTTP and REST basics, introduced us to Postman by making requests against his Restful Booker bed and breakfast application, and encouraged us to enter the Test.bash() 2022 API Challenge which was about to close. The challenge is to make a 20-minute video for use at the Ministry of Testing's October Test.bash() showing the use of automation to check that it's possible to create a room using the Restful Booker API. I talk and write about exploring with automation a lot (next time is 14th October 2022, for an Association for Software Testing webinar ) and I thought it might be interesting to show that I am not a great developer and spend plenty of time Googling, copy-pasting, and introducing and removing typos. So I did and my video is now available in the Ministry of Testing Dojo . The script I hacked during the video is up in GitHub . My ...

Last night I attended a Consequence Scanning workshop at the Cambridge Tester Meetup . In it, Drew Pontikis walked us through the basics of an approach for identifying opportunities and risks and selecting which ones to target for exploitation or mitigation. The originators of Consequence Scanning recommend that it's run as part of planning and design activities with the outcomes being specific actions added to a backlog and a record of all of the suggested consequences for later review. So, acting as a product team for the Facebook Portal pre-launch, we  listed potential intended and unintended consequences sorted them into action categories (control, influence, or monitor) chose several consequences to work on explored possible approaches for the action assigned to each selected consequence In the manual there are various resources for prompting participants to think broadly and laterally about consequences. For example, a product can have an effect on people other than its u...

I really enjoy lean coffee conversations. I am energised by the rapid-fire topic switches and love it when I get exposure to multiple perspectives. The time-boxed aspect of the activity is a turn-off for some, keeping things relatively shallow, but it's one of the great advantages of the format for me: I know that I'm only investing a certain amount of my time, and it's usually small enough that the return is worth it. All of which is background context for my experience at the first Cambridge Tester Meetup event for over a year , an online lean coffee, this week. I died a little inside when I saw The Future of Testing ticket placed on the board. I felt the pain of internal necrosis spreading as it was voted up. I winced while my pre-frontal cortex withered into a tiny blackened stump at the precise second that Devops, automation, and quality champions were tossed into the discussion. The? Future? Of? Testing? GRRrrr! For as long as we are build...

This morning I was delighted to see the long-awaited return of the Cambridge Tester Meetup in the form of an online Lean Coffee!  Here's a few aggregated notes from the conversation in the group I was in. Onboarding of testers in Covid land From the company's side: Looking for tips for getting testers up and running remotely. Structured introduction plan, inluding people, tools, and relevant docs. Encouraging the new team member to complement that with finding their own path. Remember that it's hard being new and remote. Make sure that time to learn and to use the product is available. Try to find some task that can make them feel productive, an early win. Have a buddy with priority and time to answer questions. Set expectations on both sides. From the onboarder's side: Be prepared to ask questions. Self-motivation is really important. Set some goals for yourself (to get that achievement hit). Be prepared for it to be harder. Be brave (even if you don't feel it). T...

The Cambridge Tester Meetup last night had talks from Jamie Doyle and Samuel Lewis. I took the opportunity to practice my sketchnoting again. Jamie is a business owner and an ex-tester and test manager. He described how, despite his background in testing, he has still kicked off product development based on sketchy 3am "great ideas" in teams without any testers. Having lost some money building the wrong thing, he's now an advocate of shifting testing left . He recommended that the C-level get testers in to provide risk assessments of ideas before they're committed-to, and that testers look to make contacts on that side of the business and get themselves in a position to be asked to help. He also shared some of the approaches and questions he used redoing the problematic project with a friendly tester from the bottom up. Interestingly for me, this exercise sounded like the kind of thing a business analyst might do. I see a lot of crossover between the test ...

UKSTAR are running their Meetup Hero competition again this year and I nominated Karo Stoltzenburg  with this somewhat embarrassing gush: Cambridge has had a really active tester community in the last few years: an evening meetup , a Software Testing Clinic , the Cambridge Exploratory Workshop on Testing and a morning Lean Coffee. Karo runs the first two, has been ever-present at CEWT and a regular at Lean Coffee. And, in case that wasn't enough, in our team at work she's initiated a book club, a series of "What I don't know about X" sharing sessions, and brought in guests to speak at Team Eating, our brown bag lunches. Pretty much, if there's something happening with testers in Cambridge you can expect to find Karo there. At the evening meetup she's given local testers the chance to be inspired by great speakers such as Anne-Marie Charrett, Adam Knight, and Neil Studd; to practice speaking in front of a friendly audience; to share testing stories ...

Jessica Bane presented her Scope Discovery and Alignment meeting format at last week's Cambridge Tester Meetup . As the name suggests, its function is for a team to develop a shared understanding of the reason that work is being requested, what is expected to be included, and what is not expected to be included. The structure involves collaboration on a statement that represents the mission and a breakdown of project factors (such as risks, questions, in/out of scope, resources) using tools familiar to many teams these days, a Kanban-like board and post-its. But the format is flexible and intended to service the key thing: making space for a productive conversation about the why and what , leaving the team free to go away and get on with the how . After the talk, a brief workshop gave us a chance to kick the tyres of the approach. The group I was in were asked to organise a baby shower for our product owner's wife and, after aligning ourselves first on what a baby sh...

This month's  Lean Coffee  was hosted by  Linguamatics . Here's some brief, aggregated comments and questions on topics covered by the group I was in. As a developer, how can I make a tester's job easier? Lots of good communication. Tell us about the test coverage you already have. Tell us what it would be useful for you to know. Tell us what you would not like to see in the application. Tell us what is logged, where, why, when. Tell us what the log messages mean. Tell us how you think it's supposed to work. Show us how you think it's supposed to work. Give us feedback on our testing - what's helping, what isn't. Offer to demonstrate what you've done. Say what you think are the risky areas, and why. Say what was hard to get right, and why. Recognise that we're not there to try and beat or show you up. Help us find our unknown unknowns by sharing with us  How can we help you, as a developer? Give good repro steps in you...

Abstracta's recent review of Hiccupps for their 75 Best Software Testing Blogs list says "James [shares] learnings from events and fun sketchnotes he makes."  Learnings here are from this week's Cambridge Tester meetup at Linguamatics   and, while the notes might be fun, the subject matter is less so. First up, Chris Kelly previewed his Testbash Dublin talk, The Anxious Tester, a story of how his anxiety has affected his work as a tester and some suggestions for fellow sufferers, those around them, and those they work for. That was followed by a video of The Fraud Squad where Claire Reckless presented background material on impostor syndrome , talked about her personal experience of it, and gave advice for supporting oneself  or others when the unfounded fear of being found out hits. These are timely topics during Mental Health Awareness Week , and it's worth noting that the speakers shared a recommendation for anyone experiencing difficulties...

At this week's Cambridge Tester Meetup we played Questions for Testers , a card game created by James Lyndsay which is intended to "trigger conversations and build connections." The deck consists of cards containing questions or statements with three responses. We took it in turns to read out a question or statement and the others quizzed us to help them decide which response they thought we'd give. Eventually they'd guess at our response, and we'd reveal it, and then talk about why we'd chosen as we did. Stefan 's choice was the one at the top:  Bugs and testers are like ... A. Ants and aardvarks B. Bees and beekeepers C. Cars and Cops Questions, did you say? Boom! Head explosion. Are we mapping bugs and testers to one of the entities in each response?  Does the order of the entities matter? Do they each map to just one? Could they each map to both? What relationships might motivate that mapping?  Does it need to be the same mappin...

What is testing? In one of the sessions at the Cambridge Software Testing Clinic  the other night, the whole group collaborated on a mind map on that very question. I find it interesting how the mind can latch on to one small aspect of a thing. I attend these kinds of events to find something new, perhaps a new idea, a different perspective on something I already know, or something about the way I act. In this case, under a node labelled mindset , one of the participants proposed risk-averse . I challenged that, and counter-proposed risk-aware . You can see them both on the map on this page, centre-left, near the bottom. And that's the thing I've been coming back to since: accepting that there is a testing mindset (with all the sociological and semantic challenges that might have) is it reasonable to say that it includes risk aversion or risk awareness? Let's start here: why did I challenge? I challenged because the interpretation that I took in the moment was tha...

This month's  Lean Coffee  was hosted by Roku . Here's some brief, aggregated comments and questions on topics covered by the group I was in. My favourite context-free test is ... Turn everything up to 11. Put all of the settings on their highest levels and see what happens. Power cycling rapidly and repeatedly. Sympathetic testing. Just getting a view for what the product offers. Simply trying to use the product. Smoke test. Try to do the opposite of what any documentation says. Ask how the users will use it. Ask what the customer wanted. Find someone without prior experience of the product to look at it. How do you enhance your personal development in a busy environment? We are given time for personal development at work, but I end up dong work stuff instead.  The company empowers us but it's on us to use the time. I don't want the others on my team to feel that I am slacking by taking the personal development time. I might come in to work ...

Four lightning talks at the Cambridge Tester meetup at Linguamatics last night, four topics apparently unrelated to one another, four slices through testing. Yet, as I write up my notes this morning I wonder whether there's a common thread ... Samuel Lewis showed us the money. Or, at least, where the money is held before being dispensed through those holes in the wall. He included some fascinating background information about ATMs (and a scary security story) but the thrust of his talk was the risks and corresponding mitigation strategies in a massive project to migrate the ATMs for a big bank to a new application layer and OS (more scariness: many are still running Windows XP). Much of the approach involved audit trails of various kinds, with customer and other stakeholders sharing their road maps and getting a view of the test planning and strategy in return. I enjoyed that the customer themselves was considered a risk (because they had a reputation for changing their mi...

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. Performance testing We have stress tests that take ages to run because they are testing a long time-out ... but we could test that functionality with a debug-only parameter. Should we do it that way, or only with production, user-visible functionality? It depends on the intent of the test, the risk you want to take, the value you want to extract. Do both? Maybe do the long-running one less often? Driving change in a new company When you join a new company and see things you'd like to change, how do you do it without treading on anyone's toes? How about when some of the changes you want to make are in teams you have no access to, on other sites? Should I just get my head down and wait for a couple of years until I understand more? Try to develop face-to-face relationships. Find the key players. ...

Unfortunately, last night's Cambridge Tester Meetup  talk about database unit testing was cancelled due to speaker illness. No problem! We had Lean Coffee instead. Here's a few aggregated comments and questions from the group discussion. How do you deal with internal conflicts? Give overt, verbal appreciation to the other person and their perspective. Be humble. Leave your ego behind. Conflict is healthier than the alternative.  Conflict betrays a lack of common understanding. I seek conflict. Conflict of personality or of ideas? I want to squeeze out ambiguity and lack of clarity. A stand-up row can be acceptable to achieve that. (Even if it isn't the first thing I'll try.) Some people avoid conflict because they feel they won't win the argument. What is the source of the conflict? That makes a difference. Try to keep discussion to facts; objective not subjective; technical not personal. Try to get to know each other as people. Try to build te...

Anne-Marie Charrett delivered a beta version of her Testbash Manchester keynote at the Cambridge Tester meetup this week . Her core message was that quality and testing are not the same thing: there are non-testing aspects of software development that contribute to product quality there are non-product aspects of quality which should be considered in software development. A theme of the talk was that customer benefit could be threatened by the second of these, by factors such as code hygiene, speed of delivery, and time to recover after a failure in production. Testers, and others in software development, were urged to reframe their view of quality to encompass these kinds of activities. A Venn diagram represented it like this: Interesting, but it didn't quite hang together for me. I slept on it. In the morning, I found myself thinking that what Anne-Marie was trying to visualise really had two notions of quality, and they were not the same. Perhaps she could mov...

This month's  Lean Coffee  was hosted by  DisplayLink . Here's some brief, aggregated comments and questions on topics covered by the group I was in. Are testers doing less and less testing? The questioner is finding that testers today are doing more "other" activities, than he was in his early days of testing. Where's the right balance between testing and other stuff? What's your definition of testing? I think that exploring ideas is testing. I fall into a "support" role for the team; I'm the "glue" in the team, often. I focus on the big picture. I am thinking about what needs to be ready for the next phase, and preparing it. I am thinking about information gathering and communication to stakeholders. Is there a contradiction: testers are a scarce resource, but they're the ones doing "non-core" activities. Perhaps it's not a contradiction? Perhaps testers are making themselves a scarce resource by d...

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 n...

This month's  Lean Coffee was hosted by Redgate . Here's some brief, aggregated comments and questions  on topics covered by the group I was in. What benefit would pair testing give me? I want to get my team away from scripted test cases and I think that pairing could help. What do testers get out of it? How does it improve the product? It encourages a different approach. It lets your mind run free. It can bring your team closer together. It can increase the skills across the test group. It can spread knowledge between teams. You could use the cases as jumping-off points. I am currently pairing with a senior tester on two approaches at the same time: functional and performance. For pairing to work well, you need to know each other, to have a relationship. There are different pairing approaches . How long should you pair for? We turned three hour solo sessions into 40 minute pair sessions. You can learn a lot, e.g. new perspectives, short-cuts, tips. Wh...