Hiccupps

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 ,  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-- "Isn't all testing context-driven ?" As we exist in a context, it's impossible to do anything that isn't influenced by that context to some extent. Some people take this to mean that all testing is driven by context. But d...

Last night I attended How to TDD a REST API, a webinar by Gil Zilberfeld . In it, Gil described an experiment he's running to try to use test-driven development for a service built with Spring Boot in Java. As part of this, he is building unit and API tests at the same time. The code is available in GitHub and you can follow the kindergarten moves he talked us through by reading the src and main directories in parallel in numerical order. What insights did he get from his experience? Well, as you might expect, with all the additional weight of a framework and internal and external dependencies, there is a lot of friction.  But he still thinks there is still value in using TDD, or perhaps its spirit. His recommendations include: small steps a hexagonal architecture for aggressive abstraction very thin adapters (code that interfaces your code to the external world) code and data that is framework agnostic as far as possible small steps refactoring eagerly for readability refactori...

I watched Allan Kelly 's Reawakening Agile with OKRs presentation at the Cambridge Agile Exchange last night. You can find a lengthy summary in his recent article for InfoQ and there's a book too, but here's a few points that caught my attention. If you've been around the block you'll have doubtless come across OKRs — objectives and key results — and perhaps cynically think of them as the antithesis of agile working, a management tool for the top-down imposition of overcommitments. From that perspective, promoting OKRs as a way to save agile could look a bit like the kind of sharp tactics that unscrupulous second-hand car salesmen might employ: "OKRs, one careful owner, a nice little runner, thousands of miles left in this one." Fortunately, Allan is open about the history and specific about the contexts in which he thinks OKRs can add something. In his view, their backstory is why OKRs are also a useful hack for the kind of "mil...

About once a week, on average, for just under ten years I have published a blog post. 500 posts in total. Wow. The nucleus of the content has always been software testing but what falls into its orbit has varied as my thinking, my needs, and my activities have changed over time. With one eye always on testing, and the other on my context, I've covered areas such as software development, management, recruitment, writing, creativity, visualisation, tech support, meetups, workshops, conferences, training, exploration, Jerry Weinberg, semantics, science, statistics, public speaking, sketchnoting and, erm, fixing my toilet . I was wondering how to commemorate this anniversary when I recalled that in another lifetime I wrote a music zine which also reached the ten-year mark. Re-reading the retrospective piece I penned for that I found this line that encapsulated my triple aims of honesty, economy, and quality: Be true to myself. Say what the music is. Don...

Last night I attended What Does the 'Coach' in 'Quality Coach' Mean? , a talk by Vernon Richards for the Ministry of Testing meetup in Brighton. Vern described a common transition from tester through quality engineer and into quality coach on three dimensions: process, product, and team. In that view, a tester tends work in one team on one product and have influence on team-level process; a quality engineer is still team-based but takes a broader view on process; and a quality coach extends the process oversight further still and works across teams and products. This would typically mean that the problems in front of a quality coach are less about the technology and more about the people. How should a coach deal with that? By providing perspective to those fighting the fires, always taking a position of "unconditional positive regard" which is to say that the coachee has the right information and abilities to solve their current problem. Coach and tester skill...

Last week I presented at the Association for Software Testing Career Day   along with Dan Ashby , Ash Coleman , Chris Kenst , and Eric Proegler . The event was short and sweet but also covered a lot of ground: both sides of the recruitment process, tester advocacy, and moving into a management role. Here's some aggregated highlights of the talks and the panel discussion afterwards. As a candidate, your CV should favour shorter over longer because no-one's going to read a long CV. One of the tester role skills is reporting and your CV is a report. Demonstrate your ability to summarise your experience, impacts, and values in a clear and concise way by writing a two-pager that's easy to consume.  It's worth considering having a customisable section on your CV that you can tweak quickly for each application, perhaps to focus on specific items in the job advert. Alternatively, consider a cover letter where you can explain what you think the role is, why you fit it, and what ...

When I changed jobs recently, joining a team responsible for a middleware server, I expected that much of my work would be against its API. This has proved correct, although I've been able to test at all layers in our stack, from the external front-end applications down to the very back-end tooling used by our domain experts to generate data for our application, and that data itself. Before I joined, I knew that the server was written in Kotlin and that the team use IntelliJ for development. As I've only scripted in a text editor in recent years I invested some time in getting some beginner-level skills in the new language and IDE with the help of YouTube videos and exercism.io .  I won't tell you that I didn't curse while doing it. Because I did, a lot. Why? For example, because of the new key bindings for the text editor, a new and complex environment wrapped around that editor, tons of helpful functionality with a high discovery cost and a steep learning curve, a ne...

  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 ,  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-- " Let's Just Automate the Testing " Yes, let's talk about how automation can help us test! I'd usually start by trying to understand what problem you want to solve but as we don't have that let's start with some ...

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 ,  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-- " We test to make sure it works " I know what you mean but, as we both know, there are few certainties in life. I'd probably be more nuanced and perhaps try to capture the intent with something like this: we test it to help increase t...

Last night I attended MiniCAST, an online version of the Association for Software Testing 's famous CAST conference. I've never been to CAST in person but I can say that the vibe here was great, much more informal and peer-based than the presenter-audience split I've seen elsewhere. It ran for four hours and squeezed in four talks on two tracks, several socialising sessions, and a keynote from Rachel Kibler . Rachel spoke about stress cases, those scenarios when context, or the product, or both in tandem distress the user. For example, the health-tracking app that excluded women because it didn't include menstrual cycles, or the social media app that pushed a daughter's photo into a dad's timeline with a celebratory whoop ... on the anniversary of her death, or the ride-share app with numerous pop-ups that is hard to use in the dark, walking fast, with low battery, trying to get a lift out of a bad neighbourhood. These kinds of threats to inclusivity, emotiona...