Category: Context-Driven (Page 4 of 4)

Let’s Test 2012: an awesome conference! – Part 1

May 14, 2012 / / 1 Comment

The world of software testing is changing and Context-driven testing (CDT) is upcoming. In the USA it is better known and more applied than with us in Europe. Overseas in the USA the Association for Software Testing (AST) is fairly context-driven. They organize a conference called CAST every year where CDT is one of the main topics. In 2011 the theme of the whole conference was context-driven testing. People like Cem Kaner, Michael Bolton and James Bach travel the world to learn others about CDT. They encourage others to create peer workshops like DEWT in the Netherlands, SWET in Sweden and GATE in Germany. These peer workshops help spread the word about CDT. At other conferences CDT gets some attention, but that isn’t enough… In the summer of 2011 five brave gentlemen from Sweden decided to create something beautiful: a context-driven conference in Europe! Let’s Test was born. I am very pleased to be one of the approx. 140 people who took part in the first Let’s Test ever. I feel very honoured that I was part of the totally excellent line-up of speakers that spoke there.

Me and Peter (aka Simon) Schrijver arrived at Runö in Åkersberga early Sunday morning after picking up Fiona Charles at her hotel in Stockholm. Here we met the organisers of the conference: Johan Jonasson, Hendrik Andersson, Ola Hyltén, Torbjörn Ryber and Hendrik Emilsson. The venue is beautiful!

The venue: Runö – Möten & Events

Hotel buildings 1 and 2

Keynote hall (l) and main building (r)

My Room

The view

More view

The garden

Sunday May 6th: LTWET (LEWT goes Sweden / Let’s LEWT)

After a quick breakfast I joined a LEWT-style peer workshop organized by James Lyndsay. Peter joined the people who were trained as facilitators for the Let’s Test conference by Paul Holland. Later that morning some of them would join the peer workshop. The theme of the peer workshop was “design” and we started with a small group: James Lyndsay, Desi (James’ wife), Neil Thompson, Fiona Charles and me. Later Paul Holland, Ilari Aegerter, Ben Kelly, Torbjörn Ryber, Rikard Edgren, Peter/Simon Schrijver and Simon Morley joined.

Dot voting monkeys

Great topics

Fiona, Paul and Ilari

Torbjörn and Peter/Simon

Desi, Simon and Rikard

James, Ben and Neil

Neil on relation between analysis and design


Rikard on Charisma Testing

Simon on Experimental design

Sunday evening May 6th: pre Let’s Test fun

After dinner drinks

More drinks in the cafe

They also have coke 😉

You can learn testing!

November 11, 2011 / / 5 Comments

This blog post was originally written as an column for www.testnewsonline.com (English) and www.testnieuws.nl (Dutch).

This is the first in a series of three columns. The central theme of the columns is “how do I become a software testing expert?”.

To become great in your profession, you need to learn a lot. This seems obvious. Jos van Rooyen wrote an article in Dutch entitled “Hoe goed zijn we als tester?” (How good are we as testers?). In this article he writes: “Many people call themselves professional tester without having a solid foundation. Yes, we follow the ISTQB Foundation, etc. and think that we are professional.” I fully agree with this. Lesson 272 in the book Lessons Learned in Software Testing: “If you can get a black belt in only two weeks, avoid fights”. You have to learn and practice a lot to become good at your profession. But that goes for everything: just think of sports or music.

Jos draws the conclusion that testers on average are good. I do not agree with his conclusion (besides from the fact that mathematically any population is average). I think testers can do much better! On my weblog I once wrote: “A lot of them claim that they are great testers. But are they? I think a lot of testers maybe aren’t that great…”

Knowledge and skills
What makes a great tester? The skills that make a great tester, I will discuss in Part 2. Testing is a profession, that is something I don’t need to explain. And it’s obvious that you need a lot of different skills to be a true professional. And skills, the learned capacity to carry out pre-determined results often with the minimum outlay of time, energy, need to be trained. To become an expert in a particular skill you must practice a lot, and improve yourself continuously. To be an expert in a particular field, such as software testing, you need to become proficient in many skills.

To become an expert, knowledge is important. Knowledge you can gain in many ways and you must never stop learning! “Stagnation means decline,” they say and especially in IT this is true for me. But applying this knowledge is often difficult. Experience is of great importance. James Bach said in his presentation Becoming a Software Testing Expert “Do not confuse experience with expertise.” You can have years of experience, but how do you know that you have gained the right experience? How do you know if you do it “right”? Because let’s face it: there is a lot to be improved in our projects. We have to do much better, but how do we achieve that? And how do we know what we can improve?

Learning
Looking at the different stages of competence in a learning process: you start unconsciously incompetent. So you need to find out where you can improve. Through feedback from others, but also by looking for new knowledge and experience, you find out what else you can learn. In Part 3, I will discuss where and how you can gain knowledge and experience. But we also learn by making mistakes. Preferably in a safe environment. We learn from feedback and evaluations. In the agile world, retrospectives are common and often used. In a retrospective the team identifies what went well and what can be improved.

Coaching
For juniors coaching is essential. But not only for newcomers, for anyone who wants to learn, who wants to develop, a coach has added value. Antony Marcano wrote a nice article in which he says: “One thing that I notice is that while the teams are being coached, they do amazing things. They are more happy, more productive, fast to improve as if there are no limits to what they can achieve”. In many organizations, I notice that coaching is not often used. Here Marcano says: “So, if you have a professional software team without a coach, consider, are you really helping your business save money by going it alone? Or, like the professional sports team, is having a professional development team without a coach another example of a false economy.”

I want to conclude with a tweet from Michael Bolton: “Great sports teams treat practice with the same seriousness as a game — and every game as practice and learning. Testers take note. “

Huib Schoots sees himself as a context-driven tester. Currently he works as team manager testing at Rabobank International and is board member of TestNet. He is a member of DEWT (Dutch Workshop on Exploratory Testing), student in the Miagi-Do School of Software Testing and maintains a blog on www.magnifiant.com

Second part: What makes a good tester?

Preparing a talk: so you think you can test?

August 27, 2011 / / 17 Comments

I am asked to do a talk at a test consultancy company. To prepare for this talk I want to share my thoughts with you. Hope you can challenge me to rethink or sharpen them.

As a test consultant I have worked for numerous companies and have met or worked with hundreds of testers. A lot of them claim that they are great testers. But are they? I think a lot of testers maybe aren’t that great…

Being a great tester takes a lot of practice. I like this “Becoming a Software Testing Expert” talk by James Bach a lot. The video by the way can be found here. And I see a lot of testers do not study their craft or read books about it. They do not learn or experiment at all. As a matter of fact they claim that they improved by doing their job: after years of doing my job I have a lot of experience! But as James says in his slides: “Don’t confuse experience with expertise”

In this post I like to address three topics what I have experienced that could be helpful become a better tester:
1) Adapt to the context
2) Collaborate
3) Learn & practice!

Everthing is context, context is everything!
Testers in the Netherlands are often trained with the V-Model and methodologies like TMap, TestFrame or ISTQB. Although I do not agree with everything they claim, there is “nothing” wrong with these test methodologies. Not if you don’t take them literally and see them as a practice. We need to become more “agile” in using these methodologies. Since the value of any practice depends on its context. Testers should to be able to adapt to changing situations. Doing so they are able to provide the most value to their stakeholders. Testers should focus on their skills instead of focus on procedures and processes.

Collaborate
Being passionate is contagious! By being passionate you will get your team test infected. Showing your testing skills can help the others in your team. My experience is that even developers will participate in testing if you can show them your skills. They love to build handy test tools and automated scripts which can help the team being more effective in testing! Start using your testing skills and teach others to do better testing. Testers should teach their team members how to test better! I like the way Gojko Adzic descibes it in his presentation “Sleeping with the enemy“: our role in teams will change: from testing everything ourselves, we will also be advisers in our projects. Ensuring that the team does the testing right. Our value is getting the testing right. Of course we’ll still be testing ourselves, the critical, complex testing will always be our job. In exploratory testing or paired testing we can demonstrate our testing skills. Good software testing is a challenging intellectual process.

Times are changing and so is the way we do projects. Collaboration is the key in becoming more effective and efficient in testing. Software development is a team sport: people, working together, are the most important part of any project’s context. So why do we introduce lots of test levels and quality gates? Separate the different disciplines in our projects? Create bulky test plans individually which no one will read?

Learn & Practice
Have you ever seen TV series like Benelux’ next top model or X-factor? People battle to become the best model or singer and win the show. Of course testing is not about beating your colleagues in a match. But this might be the only difference… In the TV shows the models and singers need to show their quality in different areas, every week they are trained in boot camps or by very experienced gurus. These coaches come from different disciplines. To be the best you need to learn all aspects of your job. How do we testers learn?

We need to practice continuous learning. Become skilled in various ways of testing. Practical tips to become a top tester:

  • Take testing classes: Rapid Software Testing or BBST are good examples.
  • Learn and gather ideas from reading books, online magazines and blogs
  • Learn by visiting conferences, participate in online conferences or watch the video’s that have been put online
  • Practice in Testing Dojo’s, weekend testing, software testing clubs, or organize it yourself in your organisation or team.
  • Meet with enthusiastic colleagues and discuss your experiences: peer mentoring, intervison, peer conferences, SIG’s, workgroups, etc.
  • Collaborate, learn from other disciplines: writing/reviewing requirements, coding scripts, using tools, etc.
  • Try different (open source) tools
  • Start writing and presenting about your work and thoughts, get feedback and discuss your thought to improve and discover new ideas.
  • Coach and get coached! Even professional tennis players or soccer players have coaches and trainer to get better and stay on the top.
  • Evaluate often! Make sure you get feedback from your colleagues but also keep evaluating your own work: your processes and your products. Always keep asking yourself the question: how can I do better next time??

Markus Gärtner has written a great article about this stuff called Alternative Paths for Self Education in Software Testing in the July issue of Testing Planet.

Update: slides of the talk can be found in the download section or here.

RST – Part 2

July 7, 2011 / / 0 Comments

I updated the first part of my write-up about RST a little. You can find that post here.

Heuristic test strategy model

An important part of the RST course is the heuristic test strategy model. Teaching us the mnemonics. It is fun learning how these can be remembered easily: the dumber the mnemonic, the more memorable it is…

HICCUPPS (Oracles)
Nothing to explain here I think
SFDPOT (Product Elements)
Still not very funny, just meaning San Francisco Depot.
CIDTESTD (Project Environment)
Kid Tested and mother approved! From a cereals commercial we don’t know in the Netherlands
CRUSSPIC STMPL (Quality Criteria)
The Eastern European hockey player, rocket scientist, ballet dancer, poet and politician.
FDSFSCURA (Test Techniques)
The cry of roman soldiers storming into battle: “My sandals hurt!”

If you want to know what the letters mean, just watch this video I shot during class.

Test Strategy and test plans

After the impressive part on the heuristic test strategy model, test strategy and test plans were discussed some more. With a nice defintions of a (test) plan:
Plan (set of ideas that guide your test proces) = Strategy (set of ideas that guide your test design) + Logistics (set of ideas that guide your resources to fulfill the strategy)

“Usability is often a testability problem.”

Of course I have thought of testabilty before. I also can remember several occasions where I have asked developers to help me with scripts or tooling to do my work more efficient and more rapid. On the other hand are testers asking for testabilty enough? Testers can make their work far more efficient by collaborating with developers. Ask yourself the question: “how often do I discuss testing with developers?” In agile development this is becoming common practise more and more, but shouldn’t all testing be facilitated by good tooling? It will help testing become more Rapid. Let the computer do the counting (in logging)!

The faster we can test, the more chance we have to find bugs. Bad testibilty gives bugs a chance to hide and therefore it is a serious issue. RST gave me insight in the importance of testability and while studying the appendices of the course material, I found some nice heuristics (Heuristics of Software Testability by James Bach, Satisfice, Inc.) testers can use to gain insight in testabilty: Controlability, Observability, Avalability, Simplicity, Stability and Information. While reading I realized that this is an obvious list, but I can’t remember a single project I did or have seen where testers were aware of all these factors that influence their work.

Safety language

Another eye opener was safety language! Testers tend to be very precise. Results are compared in detail, using 5 decimals if possible. And after a couple of tests we say: it works! Since I attended Michael’s TestFraming tutorial at TestNet in July, I already knew the importance of telling the good stories:
1. The product story, about how the product works, what fails and what might fail.
2. The testing story, about how we have tested the product, what we want to test and what we won’t test at all.
3. The story about how good testing was, the testability of the product and the risks and costs.

This subject also came up during the intervision session we had last week at work, where 6 colleagues who went to EuroStar last year shared their experiences and take aways. One of the topics discussed were “elevator pitches”, the importance of presenting and effective communication.

Accuracy verus precision

“Sometimes we testers spent to much time to find precise answers as accurate answers would do.” The difference between accuracy and precision is nicely demonstrated on wikipedia. I like the target analogy very much. Another thing I took away as an open door, but very true and not applied too often: in testing we should let the risk define the level of accuracy and precision needed.

A quote to finalize this post: “Testing is about questioning and learning under conditions of fundamental uncertainty“.

RST – Rapid Software Testing

June 23, 2011 / / 5 Comments

Via Twitter I read the post by Brian Osman blogging his experience with the RST by James Bach, which triggered me to finish the first post on RST today.

8, 9 and 10 June I attended the Rapid Sofwtare Testing training in Utrecht. Michael Bolton was invited by my employer to train almost 50 testers and test managers in one week. This great course got me thinking and my mind is overflowing with ideas! This post is to capture some interesting topics from the course from the notes I took.

Inspiration!

It was cool to see how Michael really knows how to inspire his audience. The first day gave me a nice view on testing vs. checking. This wasn’t new for me since I have seen Michael speak on several occasions. The part about “It works really means: it works, to some degree, on my machine, it appears to fulfill some requirement in some point of time.” made me think about the meaning of testing and how others look at it. Also the view that testability is important and the great use of heuristics inspired me to start using this in my daily work.

Asking questions

Michael is brilliant in asking questions and demonstrating “good” and “bad” behaviour by testers and stakeholders. The value of credibility and the use of safety language was discussed. It was interesting to see that the whole classs agreed with Michael without much discussion about this. I can imagine that lots of testers agree, but in our daily work we do not use it very often. We should train ourselves more in using safety language and carefully formulating our testing story. Testers also should be asking more questions! A great sentence I heard Michael use a couple of times could help us: “Hmmm, interesting, let’s talk about that!”.

Great testing questions

During the course we made a list of Great Testing Questions on a flip-over. This is the list from our class, but there are a million more questions testers can ask.

  • Who is my client?
  • Can I ask questions?
  • Are there more rules?
  • What is the budget?
  • Are there more like this?
  • Are there more of these?
  • What is the risk?

But more about safety language and questions later.

How RST can work

The best take away from the first day were my thoughts on how RST can work. During one of the exercises we were making mind maps while listing product elements. After this 15 minute exercise it became clear to me how powerful using a mindmap and heuristics can be creating test ideas rapidly. Me and my RST buddy Matthias worked together inspiring each other after every new idea. Imagine what our list could become when we would ask a designer or programmer to review it. Two-way inspiration in a split second! And how many more new ideas could we retrieve from the requirements or the client?

The best quotes from the first day could be (because we were served many): “Testers responsibility is to remain unsure when everybody is sure!” and “Testing is about questioning and learning under conditions of fundamental uncertainty”.

Context-driven tester?

Since I did the Rapid Software Testing course I know: I am (or at least want to become) a context-driven tester! Although I often praticed the Basic Principles of the context-driven school in the past and “Lessons learned in software testing” has been my favorite testing book for years now, the course made it perfectly clear to me that testing should be context-driven. RST: a must do for every tester who takes his/her job seriously.

More to follow later!

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