• A world class test team?

  Source: XKCD I've read Simon Prior's blog post Building a world class test team, and I didn't like what I've seen. There's the overuse of my least favorite 4 letter word, but putting that aside, I found that I'm disagreeing with the definitions he's using.  His idea of a "good test team" is a safety net role that enables others to disregard their responsibilities and directly contribute to worse software. The "great" test team is the first thing that starts to get close to an almost decent team, as he's added "preventing defects" which I chose to interpret generously as being involved in crafting the requirements and planning the work with the other members of the software engineering group. Then, the "World class test team" is complete contradiction. It's described as "all of the above" AND some properties of what I would call pretty good testing - not being the scapegoat, coaching, improving other functions work - a lot of things that are not very compatible with owning the large part of the testing effort. Sure, I can imagine this working in some places, but it would be like hammering a bolt that doesn't fit well into place - it will work in the end, but you've invested more effort than you should have, and it will be a mess to deal with it every time you need to change something. Instead, I want to suggest another definition - in almost all cases, a world-class testing team is one that has disbanded (or is[…]

  23.01.2022 | 12:05 קרא עוד...

• Testing at the Crime Scene, Part 3

  In this third post to the crime scene series, we’re going to continue using our crime scene techniques by adding an extra complexity dimension to what we started in the second post. We’re then going to try our analysis on a much larger code base than any we’ve looked at so far. So put on your detective hat and let’s dive in! Needless to say, you really should read the first two posts in this series to make any sense out of this one. In fact, this post is continuing on directly from where we ended up in the second post with our Frotz crime scene analysis. In the previous post, with our analysis of Frotz, we focused on the problematic modules doutput.c and dinput.c. We applied a particular complexity measure around lines of code. And while we agreed that, as evidence goes, “lines of code” wasn’t the greatest, it also wasn’t the worst. We were able to validate our choice because other lines of evidence converged to show us that there was at least some correlation between lines of code and our hotspots. Multiple Complexity Measures In a crime scene, the more clues you have, the better. The more of those clues that can actually count as probative evidence is even better still. So let’s look at another really simple complexity measure here: whitespace. Even more specifically, whitespace that is used as indentation. The idea of calculating indentation, just like calculating lines of code, is fairly trivial. You just[…]

  23.01.2022 | 6:05 קרא עוד...

• Door Not Mouth

  Periodically I get asked for advice on getting a job in software testing with no experience as a tester. It happened again yesterday.As a hiring manager I hired many testers, some with and some without testing on their CV. What's most important to me is the way people do their work, how they think and talk about their work, and how they deal with other people around their work. But I'm probably not the hiring manager you're approaching right now, so bear in mind that the suggestions I'm making below are generic, and mine, and should be taken only to the extent you think they fit you and your situation.CV, Application Form, Cover LetterLead with the skills you have and the value you provided by using them. Make the skills that you think are transferrable to testing most prominent on the list.Think very carefully before leading with a list of responsibilities such as "attended daily Scrum, reviewed proposals, edited the website". This says almost nothing that a job title won't already cover and suggests you don't think about the value you could deliver. Find things that you have done that you think are analagous to testing (e.g. proof-reading, reviewing, investigating customer support problems) and say why you were good at them and why the skills transfer to testing.Explain how your specific background can help you be an asset as a tester. For example, you've worked in the area you're applying for, you have been on the business side and can[…]

  23.01.2022 | 3:46 קרא עוד...

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