Sydney testers meetup #37 – Journey of Acceptance Test Driven Development #Sydtest

This is the official blog post of Sydney Testers meetup on ATDD.

The meetup was held at the Orient hotel in the rocks, and the place was pretty full. I thought I was smart to take a seat in a couch in the back, but the open window (non-closable) made my fingers stiff and body shaking throughout. =(

Evening kicked off with some networking and a beer, followed by opening notes with club news and testing news. I particularly like the short testing news highlights. Don’t forget to follow up on the highlights!

The Presentation – Journey of Acceptance test driven development

Devesh and Priank told us about Acceptance Test Driven Development, ATDD (slides here).

A new teams encounter with DET/TET as a framework for testing – Part 4-Facilitation

First of all, I want to be clear that this series of posts have nothing to do with my work at Atlassian. These posts are experiences from previous assignments with Jayway, and I am just now gathering my thoughts on it.

Be sure to read the previous posts which has some background:
Part 1-Context
Part 2-Intro workshop
Part 3-The basics

Facilitation

The effort of having 12-14 people involved in testing 2 hours/week needs to be prepared and facilitated. This is something that I usually propose, and the need was acknowledged rather quickly in this team.

It ended up being a rotating task within the development team to take on the facilitator role of the week. However, it was usually natural for some person to be facilitator when it came to different focus areas. This also meant that some people got the facilitator role more often during the time I was there.

I personally coached the facilitator of the week through preparations and all the way through the test session, debrief and meta debrief. Here are some aspects of facilitation that we considered.

A new teams encounter with DET/TET as a framework for testing – Part 3-Running with the basics!

First of all, I want to be clear that this series of posts have nothing to do with my work at Atlassian. These posts are experiences from previous assignments with Jayway, and I am just now gathering my thoughts on it.

Be sure to read the previous posts which has some background:
Part 1-Context
Part 2-Intro workshop

Basics

The basic principles of DET (Session, People, Focus and Reporting) are pretty easy to follow, so just doing it basic style will give some value. This is of course a place for a disclaimer, since running with the basics here would be similar to scrum, easy-to-follow rules that are just not so easy to follow. The sections below are about some aspects of the basics that we tweaked to fit the context.

A new teams encounter with DET/TET as a framework for testing – Part 2-Intro workshop

First of all, I want to be clear that this series of posts have nothing to do with Atlassian. These posts are experiences from previous assignments with Jayway, and I am just now gathering my thoughts on it.

Be sure to read the previous post which has some context:
A new teams encounter with DET/TET as a framework for testing – Part 1-Context

The workshop

To get everyone on-board with what we were doing, I started off with a workshop on testing and quality in general.

A new teams encounter with DET/TET as a framework for testing – Part 1-Context

Over the last year I have been asked many times about how to implement DET/TET at a new company. Since most of my experiences have been within Jayway where the concept is accepted, I have not been able to answer that question in a good way. This is my story of implementing DET in a company which had not been using it before or very much any other formal testing. Since i got the question, this company is not Atlassian, but my last assignment before my move.

In this first post I want to give some context about the assignment, the company and product and what we ended up doing. In the following posts I will highlight specific aspects that were relevant for this implementation in the new company.

Background

I was brought in as an Agile testing mentor to this company, which actually has no dedicated testers.

First week at Atlassian

As usual, when the blog is not updated it is a sign that I have been up to many other things lately and the blog is one of the things I needed to cut down on. The reason for the downtime this spring is obvious, I have been busy packing my life in sweden into boxes for a move down-under to Sydney, Australia. Apart from packing, there have also been plenty of other related things to do before leaving the country. I was also featured in Computer Sweden for my move (in swedish). And finally I arrived, joining Atlassian last Monday.

ConTest – A local context driven testing community

The other day was the first event of the new local context-driven test community ConTest. It was initiated by Henrik Andersson and House of Test and hosted at FooCafe in Malmö. When I got to know about it, I knew I just had to go there of course. I also knew of a couple of people that would not be able to resist the opportunity. However, I was happily surprised with how many people actually showed up. A good 30 people experienced 2,5 hours of LAWST styl(ish) peer-conference setting with lightning talks followed by facilitated discussions.

The theme of the event was simply Context-driven testing and since it was the first event, Henrik prepared a couple of us to present lightning talks that could be targeted with discussions. And I think that was a wise move, so that the people that have not experienced peer conferences before could focus on good questioning. While not everyone asked questions, I think there was a fair amount of discussions anyway to fill up the time and I think we would have been able to fill a whole day with those topics.

I was honored with the first presentation, focusing on the basics “What is Context driven testing?”. With the short 10 minutes I got, I focused on the basic principles of context driven testing and gave a few examples of how they apply. I thought myself it was a good foundation of discussion that stretched for a good hour where the people that never heard about context-driven got opportunity to wrap their heads around it.

Maria Kedemo shared her thoughts on the context-driven community. She talked about her experiences with CAST and Lets Test, how those conferences really invited people to engage each other throughout the events that are not mainly around speaking but conferring. The interesting people that are there gives incredible experiences. Also, she brought up some of the different medias of how to engage with the community through blogs, twitter, linkedIn and Skype. My comment here is that coaching over Skype is a VERY rewarding experience. If you haven’t tried it, do it soon!

Robert Bergqvist talked about his experiences in a very large project and how he applied context-driven approaches on top of the already existing and non-existing testing practices at a large bank. Since they used a pass/fail approach to test cases, he gathered his own test results in OneNote including questions for clarification, unknown areas and risks from gut feeling. These notes he shared informally with stakeholders in the project and got very good responses.

Martin Nilsson talked about his approach to using exploratory testing as a learning activity in the beginning of a big project, and how the session notes from that session became valuable as a learning resource throughout the rest of the project.

Some quotes I captured throughout the event:

In my context, If its not passed, its failed and will be handled/managed

Different contexts have different meaning in regards to test results. This was a comment on Roberts regression test results where a Failed test is really bad.

I captured the stuff that was between pass and fail

Robert about what he was doing in the project apart from doing his job.

It is never hard to find the risks

Siren Hofvanders (Securitypony) comment on a question regarding different test approaches and how also security testing can be done exploratory style.

Do the testing first and then plan for these extra things

About priorities when mixing scripted with exploratory testing

Future

I must say that everyone there got more excited and up to speed during the two latter discussions, since they were more concrete experiences. With that in mind, I also have good hopes for the coming ConTest events where I don’t think it will be any problems with filling up with experience reports to discuss.

For my own sake, I need to gather ConTest people somewhere, so I created this twitter list, Contest-Foo. As I have never used lists on twitter before I am still not sure what the point is, but I figured it might suffice trying it. So if you were at ConTest in Malmö with me and you are on twitter, give me a shout, I want you here.

As a final note, the proposed hashtag for this group was #ConTest. Whoever has been on twitter knows that hastags are used for multiple purposes, which is why #contest just gives us opportunities to win things. But stay tuned for #foocontest.

Agile Testing – Unicorn perspective

So for anyone not attending Agile testing days 2012, unicorns actually became the theme of a great conference through the collaborative work of peers. It refers to the differences and similarities between /the real world/™ and the unicorn world.

If you haven’t read the previous posts in this series, please do. Also do keep in mind they refer to extremes of perspectives.

Bridging communities
Agile Testing – Traditional testing perspective
Agile Testing – Agile perspective
Agile Testing – Programmer perspective
Agile Testing – Project management perspective
Agile Testing – Context driven testing perspective

About the extremes

My friend and Scout colleague shared with me this great analogy when it comes to discussions about things that people care a lot about. At that time a couple of us were talking about the whole global warming controversy, but it applies to many similar debates, like the one about Agile testing. “How come it is so hard for people to discuss these matters without ending up in a ditch and not getting up?”

Agile Testing – Context driven testing perspective

The context driven school of testing is a good representation of my personal normal state of mind when it comes to my profession. I really like to hang out with like-minded people that are outspoken about belonging to this community of testers. I also recognize many of the people within this community to be interested in and are practicing good Agile testing. When I started to write this post I also realized I gave it a shot 3 years ago, when I still hadn’t wrapped my head around context-driven. But although my knowledge and experience has changed a lot during that time I still think the post is valid in some sense.

Before continuing, read my previous posts in this series:
Bridging communities
Agile Testing – Traditional testing perspective
Agile Testing – Agile perspective
Agile Testing – Programmer perspective
Agile Testing – Project management perspective

Context driven testers

Similar to the Agile movement, the context-driven school has a set of principles (http://context-driven-testing.com/), followed by explanations to them for clarification. 

Agile Testing – Project management perspective

Project managers are very different from programmers. But then again, there are also many similarities when it comes to their relationship to testing. In this post I will mention the PMI community as well as facilitation communities Innovation Games and Gamestorming. The biggest reasons for my learning within these communities relates to leadership.

Before continuing, read my previous posts in this series:
Bridging communities
Agile Testing – Traditional testing perspective
Agile Testing – Agile perspective
Agile Testing – Programmer perspective

Project managers and facilitators

Like the programmers, also project managers as a community is very diverse. Even worse, their craft extends beyond software development to all other businesses.