daily post

A major lacking in large software enterprises is:

Lack of a holistic test strategy across the customer journey

Scrum teams are mostly thinking within their small box,

Worried about getting just the next story out the door, and I don’t blame them. That’s what they are judged on.

But to stitch all that together and build synergies between teams should be a prime objective of testers

The customer does not care about what happened with one story

The customer deals with the complete end product, which is a conglomerate of multiple products with many stories

Let’s not be penny wise pound foolish and ignore investing in the big picture.

#QsDaily #Testing #TestStrategy #TestingAcumen #RSQ #RedefiningSoftwareQuality

Busy designing an automation training program, here are the six main areas:

1. Testing Acumen
2. Programming fundamentals
3. Learning the tech stack
4. Building automation enablers
5. CI / DevOps basics
6. Automation tools and framework design

Drop any of these, and you wouldn’t have people who can build useful automation practices.

I know that’s a lot to do and to prepare, but that’s just me. Mr. Perfectionist.

I want anyone that goes through the training should be self sufficient.

Got a great question in my talk’s Q&A at the #AutomationGuild 2020 :

How to create test data for #BigData projects?

Generally there are three types of ‘test data management’ you want to focus,

1. Mocks / stubs
2. Generate synthetic test data
3. Masked production data

For big data, the most important one is masked production data.

You would also need to create synthetic data too, but will not be enough to see if the model is working properly or not

So make an effort to get masked production data to have greater confidence in your data pipeline and data models.

#QsDaily #BigData #TestData #Testing

Over the years I’ve started to dislike writing formal and long test cases

We need test cases, but written in a better way..

Traditionally we write them detailing each step along the way,

The idea was even if someone is not a domain expert can use them, or to make sure we don’t miss a step and know what exactly was tested

These monster documents become shackles: time consuming to write, a nightmare to update

Instead I prefer writing the ‘test scenario’ in brief with the most important check / validation over a full blown detailed list of steps

Also, importantly, using mind maps instead of test case management tools / documents

One does sacrifice the details this way, but makes things much quicker

Also provides a great holistic view of the many test types / scenarios

#QsDaily #Testing #TestCaseWriting #LeanThinking

I’ve always believed living a life bigger than yourself.

Thank you Joe Colantonio ⚙️for adding me to the top 28 Test automation engineers to follow in 2020.

My vision since 2013 has been “Redefining Software Quality”

I believe testers and testing practices need to evolve considerably to deliver value to businesses

Instead of trying to shoe horn ‘our way’ of how we do things into what people do,

We should develop skills and practices that support the industry’s needs of today.

IMHO there are three values which will help us get there:

– Technological Excellence

– Testing Acumen

– Business Value

#RedefiningSoftwareQuality #RSQ #Automation #Testing #TestersGoingTechnical

Test data management for automation is not just adding some fields in cucumber…

Test data management can include:

– Developing & using mocks for running low level tests in the pipeline

– Data creation & cleaning on the fly (more here: http://bit.ly/QS_tdc)

– Using masked production data & refresh it on a regular cadence (for exploratory / behavioral tests)

For all three, the data generation, storage and usage techniques are going to be very different.

And if you are working in a large enterprise, you most probably will need ALL THREE

P.S.

No one said automation is easy..

#QsDaily #Automation #TestData

Before any analytics can run on data, sometimes a number of ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) processes happen.

Data might pass through a series of data engineering / ETL processes to make it fit for purpose and categorized as needed

Quality across this process is all about ‘Data Quality.

I’ll explain the concept further and talk at length about how to check data quality in the upcoming #AutomationGuild

https://lnkd.in/fMp9Quf

#QsDaily #Automation #BigData #DataPipelines

I know implementing the automation pyramid is hard,

And to a large extend, is not a problem with just testing practices either..

I’ve seen teams where products don’t have contracts written up properly (API contracts / JSON schemas)

Back end services are not designed for anyone other than the developer to consume..

Such places do make it hard to implement the pyramid, i.e. 70 – 80% tests at the back end,

The solution: The whole team work on developing those contracts, and then write tests for those contracts..

Easier said than done, but until you don’t have that, testing isn’t going anywhere.

#QsDaily #Automation #Testing #ApiAutomation #AutomationPyramid

The only constant is change, especially in tech, regardless what role you play.

Similarly, dear testers, we need to change and adapt.

Change is uncomfortable and scary at best, but not a good enough reason not to change.

There is no choice but to work on ourselves “throughout our lives”! Doesn’t matter what occupation you are in.

The next time you are exposed to a new technology, language, testing technique, lean ways of working, don’t hold back.

Pushing yourself never comes naturally to ANYONE

I still ‘train’ my mind to push through my fears. And when I stop training it, I start to give into fear.

To train your mind and subconscious, one ritual can be to listen to motivational content, these days it’s Les Brown for me (linking sample video below).

#QsDaily #TechnologicalExcellence #Motivation #TestersGoingTechnical

Automation regression percentage – The metric I hate the most..

Many times the only use of this metric is to provide false assurance that we are efficient in testing.

And the ultimate goal soon becomes to automate regression 100%, which is a bad idea,

And automating just UI tests makes it even worse.

More on why not to use it and what should be done in the linked video

#RedefiningSoftwareQuality #Automation #RegressionTesting #KPIs