Categories
Software Testing
internal newsletter items - systems thinking and more
I publish a biweekly newsletter for the QE organization at my company, and I thought I’d start sharing some of what I have there. This edition is about systems thinking, as well as some other stuff. Always With the Learning Konstantinos Konstantakopoulos wrote about systems thinking and automation for the Ministry of Testing. Short read with some good insights.
Jun 2024where I'll be in 2024
I’m going to be at software testing conferences this year! It’s June as I’m writing this, and the first is in eight days, but I guess it’s better late than never! Romanian Testing Conference : June 12-14, Cluj-Napoca, Romania opening keynote - Real Life Is Not an Edge Case PNSQC : Oct 14-16, Portland, Oregon, US invited speaker - Mistakes I Made So You Don’t Have To workshop - Leveraging the Power of AI in Software Testing Testing United : Nov 7-8, Vienna, Austria opening keynote - Artificial Intelligence: the Good, the Bad, and the Bias Agile Testing Days : Nov 19-22, Potsdam, Germany musical - The Owl Problem talk - Mission Possible: Leading as an Individual Contributor I am THRILLED to be at these conferences. I couldn’t have imagined that these doors would open, and I can’t wait to meet people, learn a bunch, and share some of what I think about!
Oct 2018pair testing adventures
Last week, I finally did what I’ve been wanting to do for months (years) and engaged in pair testing three times with some differing results. what is pair testing? Pair testing is a lot like pair programming, where you have two sets of eyes and two minds engaged in the same problem. There can be a lot of benefits to it (Lisa Crispin talks about it here ), such as increased creativity, better quality, and more exploration, but, just like pair programming, it can be difficult to start and requires a lot of focus and energy. I wanted to learn strong-style pairing , as it seems to involve the most engagement from both people.
Aug 2018CAST retrospective
I attended the Conference of the Association for Software Testing (CAST) two weeks ago in Cocoa Beach, Florida. It was a fantastic learning and networking experience over four days, and I’m still reeling a little bit. I started with a full-day tutorial about how to coach testing with Anne-Marie Charrett (her site is here ). She and James Bach built the coaching model together but have added their own flavors to it. Anne-Marie emphasized understanding the person and starting from where they are. We had a couple of exercises where we paired up to teach a concept or test something, and we realized how easy it was to move in and out of pairing and coaching alternately. It gave me a lot to think about if I move into coaching, and Anne-Marie’s style of teaching was engaging and thorough. The overarching theme of the weekend was “Bridging Between Communities”, so a lot of the talks and workshops ended up stressing communication. This ranged from communicating in healthy ways to defuse situations (Don’t Take It Personally by Bailey Hanna - her blog post is here ) to a keynote about Cynefin by Liz Keogh where she said:
Dec 2017automation thoughts - an update
Last year, I wrote some thoughts about the benefits of manual testing. The posts are here and here . Now that I’ve been on an agile team for over a year, and doing some automation, I think (hope) I have some more sophisticated thoughts about automation. Our team has two “manual testers” and one “automation engineer”. The automation engineer does all of the UI automation (for now), but I’ve written a lot of service layer tests using SOAP UI, and the other tester has been learning to write them too. The idea is to have the two of us start running (and eventually writing) UI automated tests as well, and we’re taking steps towards that end. The benefits of the API testing through SOAP have become clear, but so have the challenges. It has cut down on our need to test all flows in regression testing manually. I can write service tests while the UI is still being coded, and it’s a good way to start our monthly testing cycle. After all, if something is broken at the service level, there’s no point in testing manually, and we can pinpoint the error more quickly and precisely. We have everything in our app that can be tested at the service level automated, which I feel really good about. Or, at least, we have all the calls exercised. There’s always more to test, isn’t there? A big weakness of service testing is that it is more brittle than manual testing, because if something changes in the call (for instance, a value changes from being taken from a detail to being taken from a cookie), it breaks the test, though you wouldn’t notice a difference at the UI level. You also can’t run all the negative tests (like lockout tests) you might want to run, particularly if you think you’ll run the suite repeatedly through the day. We have two test cases that can only be run once every half hour, and one test case that requires a person to reset the user every time. Those test cases are fairly essential, so we make do with them. I still very strongly believe that there is no substitute for getting in the features and playing around, or, to be more formal about it, doing exploratory testing. That’s how we find all the interesting bugs. Automated testing is checking; it ensures certain things are stable, not that a product is “good”. However, automated testing is (can be?) fast, and it can be an efficient use of time, particularly for regression testing. Automated testing can make sure that bugs that are found and fixed don’t break again, but would a person writing automated test think to try refreshing a page without first finding an issue in exploratory testing? Perhaps I’ll have more thoughts about this later, but this is what I’ve been thinking about recently. Thoughts from y’all? Criticism? Questions?
Oct 2017training a tester
I may have mentioned a few months ago that I’m training a tester who is new to mobile. We’re four months in, and I’m surprised to find that I’m still answering (many) questions daily. Language does play an important role, and sometimes I realize that concepts that are organized in a certain way in my head don’t translate well to words or the way other people think. But also, for a long time, I was just answering questions, imparting information. I’ve changed tactics, now that she’s been on our team for several months, to being more socratic. If she thinks she’s found a bug, I press her, ask her why she thinks it’s a bug, and how she can get additional information about the bug. Eventually, I want to know what her oracles are, what devices/OSes/app versions she’s tried on, what environments she’s been in, what the logs that we have access to say, and on and on. I know I don’t always follow all the steps myself, but I have a checklist published for our team that talks about all the different things to try. If she asks whether a feature is supposed to be in a specific app version, I push her to explain why it should or should not be before I give her an answer. Just this last week, I included her in writing SOAP tests, asking her questions about how we could modify certain things to get the right thing tested, instead of talking through my own thought process. I think this method is more effective. Instead of trying to describe how my own synapses fire, I’m making her form her own way of thinking about things. It’s frustrating sometimes, because it takes a lot more effort to work with someone for fifteen minutes so they come to their own answer instead of just providing it, but the goal is for it to save time in the future. In the couple months where I was the only tester on the team, I revamped how testing was documented, and how things in general were documented, to a way that made the most sense to me. I documented what I did rather than what I was going to do. My notes for things to test for were for my reference, not for anyone else to consume, and I made mind maps as artifacts. This worked great for me, and I think it’s working well for my partner, but I’m trying to be sensitive to the idea that not everyone thinks like me (nor should they), and to be open to doing things another way, should she come up with something better.
Jul 2017SOAP testing and finding the right assertions
I’ve been delving into the more technical side of testing, that of using tools to exercise code precisely rather than galumphing through UI, which really is my preferred method. Our mobile app uses a lightweight service to connect to the other moving pieces at the company and our vendors, so we can test those calls directly through SOAP, which, for you non-software people out there, is also called API testing. The developers of our software took kind of a blanket approach to the envelopes for the service calls, so there are tons of superfluous fields for each of the calls, and it’s kind of a guessing game as to which are required for any particular service call. My developers didn’t create all the service calls, so I’ve actually been able to figure things out and share my envelopes with them (so, you know, I feel pretty cool). Once I figure out which fields are necessary to get a call working, then it’s time to figure out an assertion. These are what the testing software checks against to make sure things are working appropriately. In our testing, they’re usually related to the content of a field, whether it is a “success” or “failure” message, or, in a case I was working on recently, whether the name of a document started with a specific year or not. With this case, we modified the call to pull documents one year at a time, so the call for each year needed to return only documents for that year and none others. I ended up doing a check that the count of docs that started with something other than the year I was looking for was 0. This may sound simple, but it took quite awhile to get the xpath right, and I had some (a lot of?) help from a developer. The SOAP tests are nothing without the correct assertions. You can go ahead and get all the information you want, but without an automated check on the information, the tests have very little advantage over UI testing in terms of speed, though they do have the ability to cut down on some of the noise that is inevitable with UI testing. API testing is another tool in the box. It cannot be the only thing, and it should not be ignored. It’s great for getting precise information, for making sure you exercise calls at a lower level, and it can be faster than UI testing, but it is not a substitute for a full complement of testing, including exploratory testing (galumphing), scripted tests run manually, and scripted tests run through automation. And, of course, if your developers unit test their code, that helps too. :)
Jul 2017language and learning
We have a new tester on my team. I recruited her, and I talked her up to my team. They liked her, and I was excited when it worked out. She’s not new to testing, but she’s new to mobile, and it’s a different beast and a different set of systems from what she was doing before. We’re now four weeks in. I’m exhausted. I think the fault is mine. I expected to train someone like me, and not to talk a big game, but I didn’t get tons of help when I started, and I made it through okay. But I also expected to be able to use my own language, with my own mental images and way of explaining things. That hasn’t worked so well. I’m being asked to show my work, like in math or law, for everything, and it takes so much effort to put things in terms that make sense to her rather than just to me. She’s a very visual learner, and though I make diagrams in my head of things, they don’t necessarily translate well. It’s gotten me thinking about how language is used to convey such complex ideas without many words. It’s like the Star Trek TNG episode Darmok, right? This society speaks entirely in metaphors, communicating deep ideas to each other but making it difficult for outsiders to come in. Carl and I have our shorthand, where one of us will mention a few words about a memory or an emotion and the other will instantly understand the meaning behind those words. We were at a conference once, and we ate with a couple who had been married for 50+ years and who were both deaf. Their translator explained that she didn’t know some of their signs, because deaf couples will make up signs that apply just to them. I found that fascinating, but it’s really no different from what we do with spoken word in our close relationships. I fear I’m just becoming lazy with language, and assuming that, if people don’t understand me, it’s on them and not me. I know that’s the wrong attitude, and I’m working on it. But it’s just… exhausting.
Jun 2017indispensability and value
I had a realization when I started my current job: I don’t want to be indispensable. For a very long time, I wanted to be indispensable, where things would come to a halt if I weren’t there or if I hadn’t left detailed instructions behind. I wanted to be so important to a company or a project that work absolutely required my expertise and my presence. I thought that was a sign of value, that it meant I mattered. But now, I don’t want to be indispensable. It seems to be a sign of arrogance to the point of irresponsibility and disregard for the well-being of an organization to be indispensable. I want to be valued and to train others to do my job, so that I have the freedom to take a vacation, or even (gasp) leave, somewhere down the road. I care about the team I’m on and want them to succeed, with or without me. What I want is to be valued, to be respected for the skills, knowledge, and ideas I bring, and to be regarded as a positive force on our team. However, we have a new tester on our team, and I’m training her. Though I know I really want her to succeed and be a partner with me, I still feel a little threatened, like… I’m no longer required. Even though I’ve been thinking these ideas, about the tension between indispensability and value, and coming to regard them as separate concepts, I still feel like they are the same thing, like the best way to be valued is to make myself indispensable. I actually talked with the new woman about this, so that she understands that if I start to sound a bit territorial or a bit fussy, it’s not about her, but about me, and she’s welcome to confront me about it. We’ll see how I react if she does confront me. :)
Feb 2017testing trainings - a comparison
In the past month, I’ve done two trainings on software testing: ASTQB’s Mobile Foundations course, and Satisfice’s Rapid Software Testing Applied course. The difference between them was marked. Like the SQE training I reviewed earlier and subsequent ISTQB test for the Certified Tester, Foundation Level, the mobile course was heavy on vocabulary and “best practices” and light on how to do a good job. It gave me things to think about, such as using simulators and emulators to increase coverage and getting cell data on some of our phones so our testing can be more real-life and more, well, mobile. But when it came down to it, a lot of the class was about the differences between web-based, native, and hybrid apps, and the risks involved in testing them. Looking at the risks that are inherent to the different types of apps was useful, but three days of vocabulary became a little wearisome. The test, which I took about a week and a half later, went just fine. It included a decision table, which took me by surprise, but the test wasn’t a big deal with a little bit of careful reading. I don’t have much more to say about the training or the test. I wasn’t planning on doing either, but then a spot was offered to me, so… it was fine. The training that I was really excited about, and that totally lived up to my expectations, was James Bach’s Rapid Software Testing Applied. We tested a vector graphics program called Inkscape, approaching it from some different angles. Each day was a combination of lecture, individual/team work, and review of that work. Some guys from another Utah company invited me to join their team, so I talked with them throughout the day and worked with them on the assignments. We talked about sanity testing, survey testing, risk analysis, coverage, deep testing, testing with tools, and how to report testing. It was a fascinating class, though I did receive criticism, both privately and then publicly the next morning, for some of my bug reports. (I still need to check with my developers to see if they’re annoyed by my reporting.) My ego was a little bruised, but I know he was trying to make me a better tester, and in the end, I appreciated (that might be too strong of a word) the criticism. This training brought out all my insecurities, particularly those surrounding tools, but I was also pleased to have some of my thoughts about testing affirmed. James Bach is something of an icon in software testing, and I really enjoyed learning from him. I’d like to take another RSTA class, as well as his lecture class of Rapid Software Testing. It’s possible I was just way more excited for RSTA, but I felt like I got more out of it as well. I really appreciated my company letting me do these trainings, particularly as they came so close together. I’m hoping to convince them to bring James Bach to Utah - that would just be fantastic.