Tag Archives: it-agile-blog-planet

Lean Startup Testing

A while ago I started reading the book The Lean Startup – How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses from Eric Ries. Some of my colleagues already propagated some of the insights from the Lean Startup, and I heard about the Lean Startup for the first time back in November 2010 while attending a workshop with Kent Beck (see a write-up here).

I wasn’t aware that I read about some contents of the book from a different perspective. Back in 2009 Michael Bolton and James Bach reported on testing an internet application which was from their perspective more than buggy. Even continuous deployment didn’t help much there. The company, IMVU, was mentioned throughout the book by Eric. So, I was curious now about the connection between Lean Startups and Testing. Despite the chapter with the name “Test” in it, I wasn’t surprised that I have to make that connection myself.

Since Phil Kirmham asked for a perspective from my point when he saw I was reading the book, I wanted to share my insights I got from the book, and my vision for testing in a Lean Startup.

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Lessons Learned from Context-driven testing

There has been some fluff and rumor around context-driven testing yesterday. Some folks even talked about the death of context-driven testing. Most of it was issued by the about page from Cem Kaner. If you haven’t read it yet, go ahead, read it now, I will wait here.

Back? Alright. Now, I would like to take a pick on what context-driven testing means to me, and why I think the whole schools concept can help us shape something. These are the rough ideas I had around a proposal for CAST 2012 which was not accepted. It is based on the combination of the schools concept with complexity thinking and the CDE-model. Oh, you don’t know that one? I will introduce it.

Here is the abstract that I submitted:

Title: Significant Differences and Transforming Exchanges
In this workshops participants will apply three different concepts from complexity thinking to the schools of software testing model. The three different concepts – containers, differences, and transformational exchanges – will be explained in the workshop. We will directly apply complexity thinking to the schools of testing, and discuss where we see the schools help to shape different containers, what the significant differences between the schools are, and how transformational exchanges between the different schools could happen, and maybe where they will even fail.

Armed with these tools, we will discuss how to evolve our craft of software testing, eventually extending the the concept of the different schools of thought, and find platforms for transforming software testing for the 21st century.

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