Elaborating on DET – ETDD evolving?

I got some positive response about DET that I wrote on my blog and in my CAST session proposal, so I thought I would elaborate a little on where I think this could be going. I will probably cover more hands on aspects in the coming weeks, but I really want to explain a vision I have around it first.

How about including the business stakeholders?

In my current project, I started to involve our main business stakeholders in our test sessions from the start when I got involved. And they have gotten really excited about attending once a week.

My grandma did not test your OS

About the title, I was inspired by Alexis Ohanians talk at this years Öredev, Only your mom wants to use your website. And just to point out, the story below is not strictly chronological.

My grandma is not very much of a technician. Yet she uses her computer and Internet every day, all day long. To do what? Listen to the Icelandic web radio of course, sharing her digital photos through email and play hearts, spider and winmine amongst other things. Any of these tasks must be enabled in the least amount of scripted steps to achieve as there is no room for exploration when grandma uses her computer. I have to do the exploration.

Developers exploratory testing – Expanding its value

This post was also published on my company blog.

There is a common practice in our company to perform Developers Exploratory Testing sessions, explained by my colleague Davor here. The cool thing is that this way of performing higher level testing has actually become accepted by our developers, and they really enjoy it.

In my current work of developing our organization wide practices for quality, I have made a deep dive into how DET is carried out on a regular basis. What I have seen is that DET is accepted and acknowledged as a valuable practice, however it is not really carried out in its full potential. There are many details and aspects of it to work on, especially regarding reporting and follow-up.

The other day I was asked to help one of our teams with a DET session.

Organization wide test strategy – Step1 – Deriving our quality values

This post is originally posted on our company blog, any feedback is greatly appreciated.

Our company has moved more from delivering individual consultant services to taking whole in-house product commitments delivered as a service to our customers. During the last months we have also been in a process of re-evaluating the core company values. Through this values work it has been clear that we want to feel proud about the quality delivered to our customers.

The transition in itself has evolved in a good agile manner, where a bigger quality initiative was a natural step forward. My first task was to investigate the current (not explicitly stated) quality values and propose an organization wide quality vision which has been lacking. This post will explain what I have done so far and the further work on it. The further work consists of defining models and activities to use in an implementation of our values.

Since quality covers many aspects of software development, it was clear at an early stage that our present status was not always that the product itself was of bad quality. Sometimes the development team think the quality is bad but the customer is happy, and sometimes the other way around. It actually goes down to managing the expectations of all stakeholders (team, customers, end users etc) and maximize the perceived quality accordingly.

SWET3 thoughts through mind maps

SWET3 attendees were: Johan Jonasson, Ola Hyltén, Anders Claesson, Oscar Cosmo, Petter Mattsson, Rikard Edgren, Henrik Andersson, Robert Bergqvist, Maria Kedemo, Sigge Birgisson, Simon Morley

A nice write-up by Rikard Edgren with picture of attendees and the abstracts can be found here.

This last weekend I attended SWET3 (Swedish Workshop on Exploratory Testing), which is a peer conference with a clear focus on aspects within context driven testing more than just exploratory testing in itself. This is my second time SWETing as I was also at SWET2, and I really enjoy the format as it is personal environment with a bunch of really experienced people. This also gives higher dimensions on the discussions about testing than you normally have for example in customer assignments.

The theme of the weekend was “Teaching testing”, with all the different angles that can give.

Context driven testing in passport control

Some weeks ago when I was traveling to CAST in Seattle, I had to go through the well-known border control of the US. All in all, I have to say that I was a little disappointed since I did not at all experience it as very complex or special as I had imagined. But of course there was more control than when traveling between European countries, and I was surprised about the well-informed officer talking to every single arrival in the line for passport control. While waiting, I observed how he asked very thoughtful and deep, yet quite regular and open questions about arrivals and their stay in the US. Getting closer to him made it possible to over hear some of the conversations. A family in front of me almost got into trouble when the father said the children were american citizens but they had some foreign passports.

CAST 2011 – Testing competition with Happy Purples

First of all, Ill have to report a bug in James’ blog post. We only got $23 for the worst bug report award.=)

Then I would like to thank for the fun competition James set up, it was really a learning experience and in retrospect I would maybe have put even more effort in the learning parts throughout the exercise. This, and my ability to concentrate may also have been impaired because of the time of day (after 6 pm after long conference day) and that I was still jet-lagged. But enough whining now, here is the story and my learnings that hopefully will help me make better decisions in the future.

Looking forward to CAST 2011

This spring has been a hectic one. I have been and am involved in a quite big and exciting project with many people involved at all levels. It will reach a milestone in October, and Ill step down for some other assignments.

Tonight I was reminded on my hectic spring in some tweets with Michael Bolton. Ended up being pointed to his series about the whole team approach written in January. I stumbled upon a comment from myself in Zegers post so I am sure I have read these things, but have no memory from it. Michaels posts are marked as read in my feed reader as well.

Now it is really time for some well-needed vacation, which I will spend at the World Scout Jamboree, that actually is in Sweden for the first time. Actually it will be located only one hour drive from my home, and there will be about 40000 scouts there. It is a pity, I will leave the jamboree a day earlier, just to make it for CAST. I hope to have switched to vacation mode by then, but will have to sharpen up for the conference again.

And CAST, soo much looking forward to it that I actually have almost neglected the scout camp in terms of looking forward to an event. The people I will meet are the ones I read blog posts and tweets from. I decided not to go for an emerging topic of my own, just to be able to concentrate on conferring and learning. And I really hope to meet and talk to everyone there. I am quite bad at remembering faces, so please tell me your twitter id. =)

If you are going to be there, I am going to stay some days afterwards, up for a hangout and some test talk. Or as sightseeing company.

I also hear that there are seats left

Collective note taking – More value from your test notes?

For quite some time now I have struggled with making note taking a natural part of my personal progress while testing. And well, I can say that it has really made impact on many other aspects of my work in other situations as well. I am actually quite proud to say that it has made great impact on how I perform in general, and how easy it is to make follow ups when done with anything. Now I would like to take this some steps further to explore how my notes can give more value to the whole team in a project setting, both mine and the teams’ collective notes.

Tester personality – Optimistic and Positive thinking

When I decided I would start blogging, I had to find a suitable name for it. Something personal, yet professional. It took a while, until I remembered my first chat with a respected tester I look up to. I was challenged on the most personal side I have; my happy and optimistic personality.

“You can never become a great tester if you are always optimistic!”

The sentence still rings in my ears, but I still think I am able to become just that some day, a great tester. Being a happy person has always been an advantage for me, especially at work I might say. I always meet people with a smile and happy attitude, and this usual reflects back on the way they treat me. This is why I really value getting a good start especially with the developers, whose code I will be testing.

Test results, especially those that are given as feedback to developers are rarely happy news. This is one reason I usually try to find positive things for feedback as well, but they should never hinder my bug advocacy.

As a side-note, I actually also used the /concept/ of /happy testing/ in my first big software project in university. This project class was all about experiencing the waterfall process model from a real perspective. I was test manager of a team of 4 testers in a project setting with 18 people. The most funny thing was that when all the specified tests had run, we did some exploratory testing, where we found a last bug. But since this kind of testing had not been specified in any predefined plan, we had to introduce the concept happy testing. =)

So, as long as I deliver my value as a tester professionally, I think it is really valuable having a positive attitude to my surroundings. It will make the surroundings more recipient to the information I have to give, may it be positive or negative.

Happy testing!

Update: Having a discussion about the post with James Bach, I need to clarify this. I think I am able to control the scope of my optimism, which means that the context of testing a product is not subject to the optimism. As James stated, optimism and critical thinking will take each other out because of their nature.

My reflection on this is that as long as I somewhat can control scope of optimism, the critical thinking I perform on the product is sufficient for good testing. I might mis out on some aspects, but I think that they are small enough to be marginalized as other things that I would miss for other reasons.