Category Archives: Context-driven Testing

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.

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I 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.

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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)

Here are the insights from my notes and memories.

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GATE-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.

A reflection on Cash Registers

Recently I started reading Computer Programming Fundamentals. Although this book was written half a century ago, I still found a lot of insights which is still up-to-date until now. While I faced the exercises in the first chapter, I decided to provide some answers here on my blog publicly.

This time I would like to deal with problem 1-2:

Would any of these devices or the devices mentioned in the chapter make a really major change in the performance of the cash register? Try to think of a device which would make a major change in performance.

To put this into context, in the chapter Leeds and Weinberg introduce a cash register, rather simplistic 50 years ago, but still a part of the computer history. The problem 1-2 then asks the reader to imagine additional devices which makes the cash register less error prone. Having served as a cashier about ten years ago, I think I have something to contribute on that.

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An experiment on Quality and Time

Having recently finished The Gift of Time, a gift written by 15 authors for Jerry Weinberg‘s 75th birthday in 2009, and a present from Michael Bolton when I met him for the first time in 2010, I am inspired by a thought experiment based on two chapters in that book.

The first one is the one from Michael Bolton himself where he defines the Relative Rule:

A description of something intagible as “X” really means “X to some person, at some time”.

The other chapter is from Bent Adsersen on “Time – and how to get it”. I have written before on Michael Bolton’s Relative Rule here. Bent adds a new perspective on the time factor to it. So, I will start with that.

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CAST 2011: A report on the Testing Competition

Last week at CAST 2011 we were challenged by James Bach on a testing competition. While I was initially a bit reluctant to join the Miagi-Do team, the opportunity to test with all these fine folks couldn’t be missed. One of the lessons that James later taught us, is that you don’t know someone unless you have tested with her or him. So, we formed a Miagi-Do team consisting of Matt Heusser, Michael Larsen, Ajay Balamurugadas, Elena Houser, Adam Yuret, Simon Schrijver, Justin Hunter and Pete Schneider (sorry, I forgot your last name). Not all of them were Miagi-Do testers, but we kicked butt, I think. Since Matt was part of our team, we knew right from the start that we wouldn’t win any of the US-$ 1401 that James had set as a price. Here is my report on how the competition and the aftermath went.

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CAST 2011: Context-driven leadership

On my final day at CAST 2011 I attended James Bach‘s tutorial on context-driven leadership. He challenged us to challenge the principles of the context-driven school of testing, since he became nervous that no one did that in the past decade. This is my write-up of that challenge as a follow-up.

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