daily post

Have you felt writing and maintaining test case documents a drag?

Because they are…

The old school thinking was, dev write code, testers write test cases

I talk about:

• Why the traditional way of doing test case management is inefficient
• What is a better approach?
• How will this save more time

#RedefiningSoftwareQuality #QualityTransformation #Testing #TestCaseWriting

I’ve noticed few common mistakes teams make in their transformation journey:

1. Very detailed long-term planning.

• They have a target state in mind, and then start planning in detail every step of the way.
• Processes, procedures, day to day activities planned in detail
• That is the trap agile was supposed to free us from, we’ve learned we “can’t” plan long term accurately,
• So, don’t design intricate plans

2. No long-term plan.

• Then you have teams who believe they are ‘truly’ agile and believe in not thinking more than 2 weeks ahead
• “If you don’t know where your going, chances are you may never get there”
• That too is very problematic, you’ll stay in fire fight mode if that’s the approach

So, what’s the middle ground?

1. A) Have a long-term vision.

• Crystalize the vision so everyone knows where we want to go.
• That does not mean over documentation, it means start ‘living it’, should reflect from your actions

1. B) Plan few weeks

• Do have an approach to how to get there, but make it very short-term and to the point
• That’s because it will change, you’ll try learn and then try something new
• Your plan to get there must ‘evolve’ along the way
• PDCA – Plan Do Check Act

#RedefiningSoftwareQuality #Transformation #Agile

Releasing quickly and with less toil / effort allows you to:

1. Get feedback from customers quickly

2. Improves your product quality

3. Helps you earn more money, fast..

To start on this ‘cultural’ change, include all the right things in your DoD – Definition of Done.

And this should be the effect:

The ultimate KPIs for software development?

Here are the top 3 I feel are important:

1. Defects from production – Severity and quantity.
– This should be the end goal that should matter.
– Most of the other quality KPIs like automation coverage % etc. are not the end goal,
– They are how good you are following ‘a process’, which may or may not achieve in the ultimate goal.

2. Mean bug identification time
– Average time taken to report bugs after code commit.
– This does not mean just JIRA tickets raised as bugs, automation results showing failures giving feedback too are included.
– This will capture how quickly we are giving feedback on code changes, which is a significant part of driving costs down.

3. Release cadence
– How quickly do we release a feature, starting from conceptualization till deployment into production.
– This should include all the lead time across all processes.
– The company that masters to speed this process will win, since they can adapt and change quickly looking at how customers respond.

There can be many other KPIs, I personally want to care about only these 3.

#RedefiningSoftwreQuality #DevOps #KPI #Automation

Some wisdom I learned about being an effective communicator:

Speak in such a way that others love to listen to you.

And

Listen in such a way that others love to speak to you.

Learning to speak is relatively easy. Learning to listen well is harder, and is more important.

In case your wondering, vital skill for improving your product quality..

#RedefiningSoftwareQuality #Communication #Collaboration

Assessing skills of individuals is required. Be it academics, interviews, courses / certifications and so on.

IMHO most assessments are not optimally designed which creates a lot of problems…

My biggest issue: assessments are designed not based on what is practically done on a day to day basis, instead on theoretical, trick questions which are far from practical application.

Most of the time, that’s because perhaps these theory-based ones are easy to design and ensure you’ve ‘read’ the text.

I don’t endorse this even for academics, but in interviews especially I think these are just nonsense.

Judge the person on what practical value they will bring, or value they have delivered before.

Oh, BTW, I add test like ‘codility’ in this category too (when was the last time you needed to solve O(N Log N) for work???)

In an automation training program I put together, introduced folks to learn about risk based testing.

While there is a lot that can be said about it, here are two main types of risk assessments:

Inside out risks:

– Look at how different components across your tech stack interact with each other

– Walk through the control structure (#STPA could be good tool) and highlight risks

Outside in risks:

– How your customer sees your application, from the outside in, the behavior of the application

– This is what usually testers are more focused on

It’s important for automation engineers to be good testers first, and therefore practice ‘testing well’

I am also perturbed when testers are unwilling to do ‘inside out’ risk assessment, IMHO mostly that’s due to lack of willingness to get into technical details.

Reference links in comments

#RSQ #Testing #RiskBasedTesting #RBT

Risk based testing: https://www.satisfice.com/download/heuristic-risk-based-software-testing

STPA: http://psas.scripts.mit.edu/home/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Systems-Theoretic-Process-Analysis-STPA-v9-v2-san.pdf

Learn to generate, find and use data. For instance, this report from google:

https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility/

This data can be useful for a number of industries / organizations.

For governments, they can use it to find correlations between new COVID19 cases and mobility patterns across regions and to build policies to phase out lock downs slowly

Similarly for testers, having patterns of failures / issues of bugs from production & automation runs can be extremely useful to concentrate efforts on specific areas.

Case in point, data is the new currency – Generate it, find it and USE IT

#RedefiningSoftwareQuality #BigData #COVID19

IT transformation projects might follow different models, and might have slightly different goals,

But at heart of each of them is : Eliminating WASTE.

I feel WASTE is not just a software development problem, but a challenge in everyone’s daily lives

It’s a bigger problem in software development for sure,

And hence number of practices evolved over decades to eliminate this waste.

– TQM / Lean manufacturing: Invest only on what’s required, do it right the first time (And a bunch of other stuff)
– Agile & scrum: To focus / develop what’s important
– DevOps: Develop enablers to push deployment faster
– Agile frameworks: To make organizations leaner

So if your transformation project isn’t ‘ACTUALLY’ eliminating waste, you are missing something.

#RedefiningSoftwareQuality #Agile #Lean #DevOps #EliminateWaste

In BDD workshops I briefly talk about feature slicing. In a nutshell:

Slice features so every feature should be deployable independently.

For this to happen, slice you features ‘across’ the tech stack, NOT ‘along’ the tech stack. (See attached images)

This is a common mistake, and seems easier to work that way.

For instance, develop the UI first, then the back end / business logic.

The problem here, your not deploying quickly / in small chunks.

Might as well call this waterfall development, because then that’s what this becomes..

#RedefiningSoftwareQuality #Agile #FeatureSlicing #AgileTransformation