Category Archives: Agile Testing

Testing inside agile development cycles

8 things you ought to know if you do not know anything about hiring a software tester

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In a recent blog entry over at 8thLight’s blog Angelique Martin points out to 8 things you ought to know if you do not know anything about hiring a software developer. Having been involved with the Software Craftsmanship movement since the early days, and 8thLight has played a major role in that movement early on, this list was compelling to me.

In short, Angelique reminds us to ask potential new employees for the development processes they used, their development practices, – particularly TDD, pair programming, short iterations, and continuous integration – and how they educated themselves and kept their claws sharp. She also points out that she would ask for a proof of their talent, how they estimated, how deadlines are met, and what they can say about the costs involved when developing software.

This list was so compelling to that I decided to put up a similar list with the things I was looking out for hiring a software tester. I believe there are some unique skills I would look for in a software tester that I would not necessarily look for in a programmer. So, here it is.

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Test levels in Agile testing

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In the past week Ulrich Freyer-Hirtz on the Agile Testing mailing list asked about different testing levels in an Agile project. He found the definition of unit, component, and acceptance tests appropriate based on several books. This discussion reminded me about the ambiguity that we face today in terms of testing. There have been several renaming attempts in the past few years. For example Dale Emery refers to a blog entry from 2004. Gojko Adzic made a similar renaming attempt. Let’s take a step back, and see what all those names really want to tell us. Afterwards we will be able to make a more informed decision about names.

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Alternative Paths to Certification

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I received quite some feedback on my last blog entry on certification. One of the feedbacks made me wonder what an alternative to certification is. This question struck me hard enough to write a follow-up on that. I think this question can be answered solely in a certain context. I’ll try to answer it under several contexts, one by one.

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Certification

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On the Agile testing mailing list there is currently a discussion on-going about the value of certifications and certificates. I have a strong opinion on it, and I would like to provide them on my blog. The basis has been the upcoming Certifiaction program for Agile testers. I have provided my critics to their courses as far as I could. I admire the efforts people put in such courses. That said, I don’t intend to offend anyone involved in certification programs, and will try to raise my objections as constructive as possible. But I also know that I will fail from time to time.

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Agile makes the problem transparent

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When my colleagues or myself teach Agile classes, we often refer the ability of Scrum or Kanban making the problem transparent. The teams still have to react appropriately upon it. This also holds true for testing in Agile projects. Motivated from the discussions at the German Agile Testing and Exploratory workshop, I ended up with a realization, that not only Agile testers profit from soft skills and collaboration with programmers.

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Lessons from complexity thinking

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While Diana Larsen was in Germany in July she spoke about a course she was currently taking called Human Systems Dynamics. Since then some of my colleagues started to dive into it. So did I. I didn’t take the course, but decided to go for some of the books on it. The first one I came across is called Facilitating Organization Change – Lessons from complexity science, and deals with a lot of stuff on complexity science, self-organization, and how to introduce changes in a complex adaptive system (CAS). These are some of my first thoughts after finishing the book.

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I don’t want to be called QA anymore!

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This is the title of a talk I submitted to two conferences this year. At one it made it into the program: the Agile Testing Days in Potsdam. It’s a pity that I got sick over the weekend, so I won’t give that talk. Anyways, I thought people might be interested in the talk, so I wanted to share some thoughts on my blog about it.

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First German Agile Testing and Exploratory Workshop

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German Agile Testing and Exploratory workshop took place in Hamburg, Germany. As the content owner I asked every participant upfront in an e-mail to prepare a statement on the following three questions:

  • What is your position in regard to Agile Testing?
  • What is your position on Exploratory Testing?
  • What is happening in the field with regard to Agile and Exploratory Testing?

The participants for this first workshop were (in the picture from left to right)

Here are the insights from my notes and memories.

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GATE-Workshop attendees

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Today, I published the first set of attendees for the GATE Workshop on 1st of October in Hamburg, Germany. By name, these are

  • Maik Nogens, Meike Mertsch, Eusebiu Blindu, Sven Finsterwalder so far.

    As we have received fewer submissions so far than we hoped, I think I need to write something about my expectations as I consider myself the content-owner of the German Agile Testing and Exploratory Workshop. What strikes me when I visit teams claiming to do Agile, I often find their teams doing either of the following:

    • Exploratory Testing – applied bad, without debriefings, charters, and without the collaboration that would make it more structured, and provide product owners and managers with the information they are asking for
    • Test Automation – mostly done by programmers or testers who have a strong background in programming, sometimes not even beyond unit tests on an integration level between multiple classes

    As I see immense drawbacks focussing on one or the other of the two approaches, I am convinced that Agile teams can do better by using a combination of both worlds. Exploratory Testing alone might leave an Agile team with the problem, that exercising all the tests becomes a burden over time – especially when programmers lack proper unit tests. Test Automation – even with ATDD – alone ends with the drawback that for human obvious holes are left in the software.

    That said, I am interested in good applications of Exploratory Testing on Agile teams, what helped them succeed, and what could help them manage their Exploratory Testing. I am also interested in Test Automation topics, how they helped Exploratory Testing gain momentum. Finally, I am also interested in talks about how to prepare the tester’s mind, and where the connection between traditional testing techniques and Agile testing techniques might be.

    So far, there is a strong balance towards Exploratory Testing in the schedule. I like this to some extent, but I would also see more attendees on Test Automation, ATDD, BDD, you name it. So, if you think you have something to contribute, drop Maik or myself a line, and we may have a discussion about that. IF you’re unsure what GATE will be, read my initial blog entry on it.

    • German Agile Testing and Exloratory (GATE) Workshop

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    Maik Nogens and myself are organizing the German Agile Testing and Exloratory (GATE) Workshop. We are proud to announce the call for contributions for this workshop. It will be held in Hamburg, Germany on October 1st 2011.

    GATE will be a low budget, non-profit peer workshop. This means that we might split expenses for the location and commodities equally among the participants (probably below € 100). Every participant will take care of the remaining costs for her- or himself, e.g. travel, lunch.

    As the main goal we identified the following elevator pitch:

    For ambitioned testers who want to learn established approaches and practices in the craft of software testing the GATE workshop provides a platform for an equal knowledge exchange. In contrast to traditional conference formats the GATE workshop provides a practical, low budget, controversial experience on software testing.

    That said, we are interested in contributions such as

    • realistic experience reports
    • controversial testing techniques
    • testing in practice (Testing Dojos, Hands-on testing)
    • options for distributed software testing

    Feel free to contact us if you are unsure. We will be most glad to provide you feedback.

    The language of the workshop will be dependent on the workshop participants. It might be German all day, but if we got international contribution, we might decide to hold the workshop in English.

    If you want to attend the first German Agile Testing and Exploratory Workshop, come up with a contribution, and send it to us until September 5th. Further details on the attendees, the program, and travel information will be provided later.

    If you are interested in the format, there have been quite a few of these peer workshops in the testing space recently. Here are some pointers:

    Hope to meet you in the nicest city in the world. Hope you are as excited as we are.