The software industry is witnessing a strong momentum in the adoption of agile and lean practices. Agile, Lean, Continuous Delivery, DevOps, Lean Startup have a massive impact on the role of testers. Discover how to stay relevant as a tester in a changing world.
16. How is our industry changing?
• Agile and Lean software development
• Continuous delivery
• DevOps
• Lean Startup
What are testers told they need to learn?
18. The 7 steps of test automation failure
1. Organization transitions to agile
2. Testers are told they will automate testing
3. Testers start to learn how to automate
4. Testers are behind with automation
5. Testers under pressure
6. There is no time for automation
7. Automation is a failure!
Some slight variations to the above might happen
20. Question
• Will we always spend ~90% of our time in
activities that are geared towards bug
detection?
NO
Our current role is challenged, what are we
going to do about it?
23. Better answer
• I’d like to learn how to better collaborate with
developers and business users and build trust
• I need to work on my communication skills
• I need to be more empathetic with my
colleagues, their success is my success
P.S. If you are trying to be agile and you have a test
team separate from the development team you
are doing it wrong, no 2 ways about it.
27. Better answer
• Can I collaborate with developers and
business owners to prevent some of the
defects and reduce rework?
• Can I collaborate with developers to automate
some checks to reduce regression testing
time?
• How can I use my inquisitive skills to help the
team succeed?
30. Better answer
• I wonder how this works, I’d like to know more
• Can we use advanced monitoring to
understand how the customer is impacted in
real time and react quickly
• Can we rollback fast and inexpensively if
something goes seriously wrong and reduce
customer’s pain?
31. Challenge #4
Some crazy dude from the Lean Startup
movement says that we should do experiments
with customers using fake products to
understand how to build a better product
33. Better answer
• I wonder how this works, I’d like to know
more, maybe I’ll read the Lean Startup book
• Wow, with my inquisitive skills I can really help
my company design better products
• I always wanted to help my company build a
better product, I really want to get into this!
41. Larry’s mistakes
He refused to acknowledge the change
He refused to embrace the change
He refused to BE the change
42. Be the change
Help remove the barriers in your organization
• Pair with developers
• Pair with analysts
• Coach developers and analysts on how to test
• Offer help to analysts and developers
• Introduce collaborative activities to your team
(like BDD)
43. Be the change… (continued)
• Get closer to business people and show them
you want to help them deliver better products
• Show interest and learn innovative ways of
testing, don’t dismiss them just because they
are outside your current model
• Look at how other testers have resolved these
problems in other companies (plenty of blogs
out there)
The software industry is going through a fundamental change
This change is going to impact strongly the life of testers as we know it
The information out there is confusing and contradicting
My goal is to help you reflect on what the changes imply and give you some pointer on how to embrace the change
In my personal experience I have gone through the change and helped others survive it
Let me tell you a story.
This is the story of our friend Frank the Dodo
Frank the Dodo was a happy big bird with no wings
He lived in the sunny island of Mauritius
In Mauritius there were no predators
Food was abundant, lovely fruit that Frank loved could be found everywhere on the island
Frank the Dodo was a big guy, he was up to 3 feet 3 inches tall and could weight a healthy 50 pounds
He wasn't an athletic and gracious runner, but why run? Fruit doesn't run away there are no predators to run from.
One sunny day in 1598, a Dutch sailor spotted the lovely island of Mauritius and decided to settle down there together with other sailors and their families.
When the sailors and their families moved over, they brought with them their pets
…and some illegal passenger on their boats.
The day that a sailor's wife saw a dodo for the first time, it was the start of the end of Frank's quiet life.
A 50 pound bird that can't fly and moves slowly?
Dinner time!
Frank had no chance, he could not fly away or run from hunters, dogs and rats and soon enough…
…he became extinct
Google “dodo wikipedia”
Nowhere
He couldn’t do anything about it
The circumstances changed to quickly and he could not adapt to survive
These are the changes we are facing
The industry seems focused on one fundamental thing that the testers need to learn to adapt
If I based my idea of where testing is going on the job offers I receive I would say test automation is what testers need to do
Every tester in this world is told that he/she needs to learn how to write test automation
Test automation involves software development, if you want to become a developer, then focusing on test automation is a good strategy
Automation efforts are often failing
The responsibility for automation cannot stay with testers only.
The developers need to participate by creating automated tests and creating a testable application
A good test automation pattern is the test pyramid and if you look at it closely you will see how it doesn’t work if developers don’t participate
The industry has focused on GUI tools and as a consequence it has created a common antipattern where GUI tests are the majority
One common approach that will work well with all the changes that are coming is to remove the silos you still have in your organization
Remove test, development and analysis departments and create a delivery team that will focus not on lines of code or defects identified but on delivering better products to the customers
Let me tell you another story
This is the story of our friend Larry the Tester
Larry the Tester was a happy guy that knew how to test
He lived in software testing teams with other testers and they fed off the bugs written by developers
Bugs were abundant they could be found everywhere
One cold winter day in 2001 some lunatics that called themselves developers met to discuss how to write better software and came out with The Agile Manifesto
Nonsense said Larry, testers and developers must work separately and maintain independence, cross-functional teams will never work!
To make this worse, in 2003 2 Americans, Mary and Tom Poppendieck wrote a book where they added lean manufacturing principles to the agile ones and proposed Lean Software Development
Wrong Wrong Wrong said Larry, bugs cannot be waste, bugs are my food, I feed on them. And what's with that stupid idea that you can prevent bugs? Bugs can only be detected!
When few years later a guy called Jezz Humble started talking about Continuous Delivery and others introduced the concept of DevOps Larry thought he was losing his mind.
Larry said, this is all nonsense, I don't need to learn anything of this, testing will always be testing and testers will stay testers!
He refused to acknowledge the change
He refused to embrace the change
He refused to be the change
You will enjoy your transformation journey if you will BE the change
It is easy to do it, these are some suggestions that will help you become a change champion