Katrina Clokie leads a team of around 100 testers as a Test Practice Manager in Wellington, New Zealand. Katrina is an active contributor to the international testing community as the founder and editor of Testing Trapeze magazine, a co-founder of the WeTest New Zealand testing community, a mentor with Speak Easy, an international conference speaker, frequent blogger and tweeter.
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Most of the software projects I have worked on come along with either a specification or a set of acceptance criteria. To the product owner, this is a list of what to build. To me, it also looks like a list of test ideas. A tester can take each point in the specification, or each line item in the user story, perform that as a test, and be done. That creates a nice tidy picture of testing that is easy to describe to non-technical people, and is easy to get done in a time box.
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After working a tester for a couple of years, I asked myself the question “Where do I go from here”?
I suspect I’m not the only person who has asked themselves that. Particularly in testing, where people move in and out all the time. A person might start working as a tester for a few years, then move into a programmer role. At some point they might be a product manager, and then there is the management path to consider, too. The career of a tester can meander and isn’t bound by an organizational chart.
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I was in a daily huddle for the testing group and the person who spoke before me said they were about to do some regression testing. We were in the middle of a sprint and they had found a bug in a new feature. They reported the bug and talked with the developer. A couple of days later, there was a new build with a fix. When my colleague said regression testing, a few people spoke up. We weren’t at the end of the release cycle and feature development was still happening. Any time spent doing regression testing would just have to be done again.
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It’s a big, Agile world out there, filled with lots of advice about how Agile practices can help your company deliver more stuff, better and faster. As a tester, you might see those Agile practices as being great ideas, but be unable to get them implemented in your organization. Perhaps instead, you can incorporate some of them into your everyday testing practice?
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Reviewing completed user stories before they get put in the test queue is a pretty normal part of my day. We look at the user story together with the completed work. I ask questions, some of these questions reveal missed acceptance criteria or plain old defects. The problems get fixed, and they get put into the Ready to Test list. Today I had a review that was a little different.
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I view software testing as an inherently creative act, and I’m excited and inspired by the challenge of finding ways to generate ideas repeatedly, reliably, and regardless of familiarity with the task at hand. I want to be creative when looking for non-happy paths through a product, both those that are desirable and those that should be ruled out. I appeal to creativity when seeking edge case scenarios that users will bump up against (because they always do!) and to explore how the product behaves in them before the customer does.
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I first learned about quick attacks from Elisabeth Hendrickson’s Test Heuristics Cheat Sheet. The product we were working on back then was used by sales people to figure out the best way to price a product, such as a gallon of oil. Our clients would enter what they wanted to sell, figure out the different fees, taxes, shipping costs, storage fees and then calculate options for discounts. There were lots of places and ways to enter data that affected the final price.
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Over the 15+ years Ben Kelly has been testing he has built and led teams in Australia, Japan and the UK at companies ranging from small start-ups to enterprise level multinational corporations, including heading up software testing for the European Product Development department at eBay. Ben’s view of testing and software development is heavily influenced by his martial arts background, holding a 5th Dan in Kendo and having represented Australia several times at the world Kendo championships.
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Programming skills can be taught through repetition. Pick a programming language. Pick an exercise, for example, the bowling kata. Then, perform that exercise once a day for a few weeks, trying to get the code a little more concise, readable, and efficient each time. If only it were that easy to teach testing. Sadly, you can’t un-find a bug.
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