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.
Continue reading Agile makes the problem transparentCategory Archives: Agile Testing
Testing inside agile development cycles
Lessons from complexity thinking
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.
Continue reading Lessons from complexity thinkingI don’t want to be called QA anymore!
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.
Continue reading I don’t want to be called QA anymore!First German Agile Testing and Exploratory Workshop
Last Saturday the first 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)
- Eusebiu Blindu
- Maik Nogens
- Christian Baumann
- Markus Gärtner
- Meike Mertsch
Here are the insights from my notes and memories.
Continue reading First German Agile Testing and Exploratory WorkshopGATE-Workshop attendees
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
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:
- Swedish Workshop on Exploratory Testing
- Dutch Exploratory Workshop on Testing
- London Exploratory Workshop in Testing
- ,Calgary Perspectives On Software Testing
- Los Altos Workshop on Software Testing.
Hope to meet you in the nicest city in the world. Hope you are as excited as we are.
On the PageObject Pattern
Recently I started to think more in depth about the PageObject pattern – at least how some folks called it initially. One problem I noticed in discussion with colleagues and clients is the lack of pattern description for this so called pattern. I decided to explore this problem in more depth, and try to come up with a constructive solution to that problem.
Continue reading On the PageObject PatternOn Programmer-Tester separation
One of the things that testers in my classes on ATDD and Exploratory Testing struggle the most with is that programmers and testers appear to give up independence with this approach. My first reaction to this is often that I hear them asking to leave their testing silos in place, and start to convince them to collaborate more with the programmers. By hard I recently learned that the Helpful Model (“No matter how it looks, everyone is trying to be helpful.” Secrets of Consulting, page 101) and the Rule of Three Interpretations (“If I can’t think of at least three different interpretations of what I received, I haven’t thought enough about what it might mean.”, Quality Software Management Volume 2 First-order measurement, page 90) also applies to myself.
Continue reading On Programmer-Tester separationSecond Writing about Testing conference in 2011
On May 13th and 14th I attended the second Writing About Testing peer conference in Durango, CO. Chris McMahon had been such a pleasant host. The overall theme was about new frontiers in testing. The atmosphere was very inspiring considering all the writing energy in the room as well as the terrain outside. Here are my impressions from the talks.
Continue reading Second Writing about Testing conference in 2011The tool vendor fallacy
Today I came across a blog entry on the need for programming expertise for test automation. I had the urge to reply. While doing so, I decided to put my reply up on my blog and call it the tool vendor fallacy. Just in case…
Continue reading The tool vendor fallacy