For teams operating in DevOps ways of working, test code needed to be written sometimes can be as much as production code itself.
Still having someone to build and advise on test code architecture & automation seems like an alien concept to many teams.
I’ll be talking about our transformation journey and developing this role at the #TestLeadershipCongress 2020
What would be the most effective test automation KPI?
Few candidates in my opinion:
What others can you think of?
#TestAutomation #Testing #KPIs
There is a lot of good content out there on writing good use stories,
The list can surely be longer, with these actions you should be able to write decent user stories resulting in highest value features delivered quickest.
#RedefiningSoftwareQuality #Agile #UserStories #Automation
Complex problems necessarily don’t require a complex solution..
Often a simple simple solutions work best
This is crucial to understand as a programmer, we often love to over-complicate things
This doesn’t just take more time to implement, but way more time to upkeep and maintain.
“A problem well stated is half solved”
If we use that in the context of shift left:
Half of testing is really asking questions and re-hashing the problem statement properly BEFORE coding is complete.
Agile does NOT mean no documentation, most teams run into this trap.
It ‘values’ interactions over documentation – so interact with people then document the decisions from the interaction.
For instance, defining service contracts – white board the points, producers and consumers discuss what’s needed,
And after decision is made, then ‘document’ it.
Coding a feature is not the bigger problem –
It’s everything ‘around’ that development is what’s hard:
Effort that goes into:
– Making sure we’re building the right thing,
– Adequate testing of what’s developed
– Automated checks to test the functionality across tech stack
– Infrastructure to support development and testing
– Automating deployment across environments
– Observability & alerts to detect any anomalies
So you see, it’s not just ‘writing production code’ anymore. To be truly agile and having DevOps practices there is a lot more that has to be done.
#RedefiningSoftwareQuality #Transformation #DevOps #ContinuousTesting
Automation training doesn’t start with learning automation tools,
It start with learning testing fundamentals!
Learn what to test, where in the tech stack to test and how to test.
Next we can talk about what to automate, where and how.
The unfortunate part of many folks lerning automation – their training starts and ends with Selenium
And I say this all the time, you cannot pick a worse place than Selenium with Java to begin with.
Nothing against Selenium or Java, brilliant library & language but that’s not the starting point.
Most people feel what they lack is automation skills, unfortunately often engineers lack “Testing skills”.
If that’s not fixed, you’ll get garbage in and garbage out.
#RedefiningSoftwareQuality #Testing #Automation #TestAutomation #ContinuousTesting
Some background to ‘flattening the structure’
In the industrial revolution and mass manufacturing era, companies operated with lots of workers doing remedial tasks.
We had hundreds of people doing atomic jobs and funneling up progress & information up the ladder.
After information consolidating across many hierarchical structures, ‘management’ took decisions and sent instructions down the corporate ladder
In the internet age, we don’t have much remedial work left in many places & the speed of operation has phenomenally increased
Workers have been replaced with ‘knowledge workers’
OR ‘Smart creatives’ who are tech savvy, business savvy and are closest to the ground reality
Therefore decisions should not be made at the top, rather by the engineers closest to the situation
Which renders no need to ‘manage’ people and take decisions for engineers, rather just ’empower’ the engineers to take decisions.
Hence the necessity of flatter org hierarchies and Servant leadership
#Transformation #AgileTransformation
#ServantLeadership
Which language for automation – Java or JavaScript?
There is NO silver bullet answer and it might not even be these two (Python or Ruby)
Here’s what I have used historically:
Services automation: Java (Where prod code is in Java)
Again, no silver bullet answer – need to consider various factors to decide for your team.
#TestAutomation #Testing #Programming
