alikhalid

Just completed the slide deck for my talk at Test Leadership Summer, if I have to summarize the key take away that would be:

“Think globally, act locally” – Learned from my MBA

This is the middle ground between the two extremes of test planning:

No planning:
– Teams don’t have a target vision to work towards
– Often teams spend most of their time putting out fires
– In the end not enough synergies are built and no significant progress is made

Too much planning:
– When teams plan every little activity in extreme detail
– Within weeks the plan becomes obsolete because of unforeseen circumstances

Think globally – Have a very clear vision of your target state
Act locally – Have high level plan for few months, and detailed plan sprint by sprint

That way your plan is fluid, and everyone keeps moving in the same direction, towards the target state.

How to get that plan in place, join me to find out more..

https://lnkd.in/ei6xbQc

You’ll find yourself at a time in your career where you are crammed with meetings all day.

And often you might see more than needed people in meetings, some who are there just for ‘FYI’ and not necessarily subject matter experts to contribute

Our CTO Alex Alexander has some good guidelines to help avoid some anti-patterns like this and others:

1. Meetings are not free, schedule them carefully
2. Every meeting should have an objective, outcome and agenda
3. Invite only those who need to attend, not a person more than necessary
4. Attendees come prepared, do constructive discussion which is for that meeting only – Stay on point
5. Meeting ends with a set of actions
6. No meeting should have more than 9 people
7. Try to schedule most meetings for not more than 30 minutes

Make your meetings short and effective..

#AgileTransformation #Productivity

Traditional test case writing practices are extremely inefficient

When I say traditional, this is what I mean:

– After sprint planning, tester goes to his little corner and studies the user story / requirement
– Then based on hunches and how the day at the office was, figures out some test scenarios
– Next go about writing those tests ‘in detail’ and link them to requirements for traceabiility
– Once the feature is marked as ‘ready for QA’ then ‘executes’ the tests
– Then send reports based on the ‘test case execution results’

Next sprint, the PO want’s to try some changes in our user story, and the tester starts the cycle again – or chooses to not go through that hassle and leave the tests outdated.

Now that’s traditional 15 years old stuff – it never worked back then, and certainly does not work today

Then there’s the transformed ‘Agile’ team. In thier mind, since their agile they don’t write ANYTHING – that includes any kind of tests

Now the test coverage depends even more on our tester’s mood swings and the weather outside!

None of these approaches work, and certainly are not efficient of effective.

There is a lot that goes into building a great team,

IMHO hiring the ‘right’ people and then giving them freedom are key ingredients.

The ‘right’ people may not be just highly skilled, but also have the right attitude and social skills.

Giving freedom is even harder part. But remember, your building a great team to ‘think’ and give you solutions, not so you tell them what to do.

Giving freedom not only leads to good decisions, but also increases ownership in the team

When they are taking decision, then they try their best to make it a success – if you decide on their behalf, there’s less ownership.

And all of that leads to good quality. Ultimately quality is not something you paint on top – it’s the way you build software determines the quality.

#RedefiningSoftwareQuality #AgileTransformation #TeamBuilding #Hiring

“Default to open” (from how google works by Eric Schmidt)

Many of us designing platforms, gathering information / insights, generating product documentation, source code – the default state is to keep it all secure location

Then we start thinking about giving access on ‘need basis’ and ask people of ‘evidence’ why they need access

At first this may seem like common sense and harmless, but before you know you have all sorts of things under lock and key

Different project source codes, product documentation, analysis, features being developed, CI pipeline test results… and the list goes on

This stifles progress and engineers to do their job well, most of their time then is spent ‘unblocking’ themselves.

The default setting to EVERYTHING should be ‘OPEN’, not ‘CLOSED’.

Engineers in your teams are not hired to do dummy jobs like building walls, they are hired to THINK

And if you want to help them take good decisions, they need to be exposed to first hand information / stats & figures.

To have true autonomy, you should have free flow of information.

#RedefiningSoftwareQuality #AgileTransformation #Transformation

Today I learned positivity has a special place in ‘being’ agile.

Unless your team does not have a positive vibe, they wouldn’t be able to self-organize and be productive.

From my personal experience, when I’m feeling down my productivity starts to dwindle.

For many of us, we are driven by our past experiences and most of us don’t expect really great things at work. We’re just waiting to find something negative and start with our rant.

If we treat “The past as a place of reference, not a place of residence” [1] things would be a lot better.

“The past is a place of learning, not a place of living” [1] – live in the present with a positive attitude!

[1] Roy T. Bennett

#AgileTransformation #Positivity

Flakiness kills automation..

The worst team I’ve seen, their scripts flakiness was around 70 – 80% !

With that kind of failure rate, looking at the reports was impossible, so instead they saved ‘error’ messages from the AUT separately and look only at those

That was an extreme, but more than often I see teams having inadequate details in their reports

I’m happy to see over years reporting libraries have improved, still sometimes come across teams not doing it well.

Further on automation test reports in the linked article (first comment)

#TestAutomation #TestReport

Crystallize your target state, but plan for only few weeks ahead..

The mistake I’ve made in the past is to plan every step of the way on how to reach the target state.

Being agile, to me, means have a very clear picture of where you want to go but only plan the steps you’ll take in the next few sprints.

We’re bad at planning and cannot predict very well, so plan just enough.

For this to work, management and the team need a little faith.

You’ll get there, but by taking small steps in the right direction and course correcting, not by planning every step of the way’.

#RedefiningSoftwareQuality #AgileTransformation #Agile

Should tester’s learn programming? And is it just for automation?

IMHO, every software engineer should be able to program, and it’s not just for automation,

Rather the ability to understand production code and how the control flow works across the tech stack.

Not everyone has to be a wiz at the whole architecture, but not completely clueless either –

IMHO the justification of: “I test just like the user, hence I have no need of knowing how the product technically works” is extremely wrong

Every software engineer should have the capability to look at code and make sense out of it.

#RedefiningSoftwareQuality #TechnologicalExcellence #Automation #Transformation

Most common calculation of Automation ROI:

Savings = Manual execution time * no. of times expected to run

Except, this doesn’t give any real value..

These tests we are calculating under time ‘saved’, mostly never get tested!

A lot of times testers just try to fit in whatever they can in the given time duration, and many of these tests just cannot be done

The real value of automation is the quick feedback you get

Instead of regression issues being reported weeks later, devs get instant feedback and takes a lot less to fix the issue.

Automation does save effort, but not in the way we usually calculate it.

Details on this and other ROI calculation aspects in the linked blog post