There’s an interesting cultural effect happening within the broader testing community. I’ve written about this before, where my thesis, if such it can be called, has been that a broad swath of testers are using ill-formed arguments and counter-productive narratives in an attempt to shift the thinking of an industry that they perceive devalues testers above all else. This has led to a needlessly combative approach to many discussions. In this post I want to approach this through a couple of parallel lenses: that of game studies, linguistics, and anthropology. That will lead us to insider (emic) and outsider (etic) polarities. It’s those polarities that I believe many testers are not adequately shifting between. Continue reading The Emic and Etic in Testing
Category: Communication
Should Testers Own Quality?
I recently participated in a discussion around the idea of whether testers “own quality” in some sense. The answer to me is obvious: of course not. But an interesting discussion did occur as a result of that. This discussion led to my post about what it meant to own quality across the abstraction stack. But there’s a more systemic concern with this level of thinking that I want to tackle here.
Testers and the “Just Semantics” Dismissal
I believe that semantics matter. I do realize not all semantics matter equally. But, still: semantics matter. It’s disappointing when otherwise intelligent people seem to dismiss something simply because they feel it’s just semantics. Let’s talk about this. Continue reading Testers and the “Just Semantics” Dismissal
The Danger of the Muddy Thinker
I talked before about tradition and dogma and not too long ago, on LinkedIn, I saw someone post yet another one of those bits of dogma in our industry without considering the context. The discussion that ensued showcased exactly the problem with simply regurgitating the “received wisdom” of others. So let’s talk about this. Continue reading The Danger of the Muddy Thinker
Unpacking the Suitcase Words
The question periodically comes up as to what the difference is between “Quality Assurance” and “Testing.” And a disturbingly large number of test professionals will say that “Testing is a subset of quality assurance.” This is a terrible response. Let’s talk about that. Continue reading Unpacking the Suitcase Words
Levels of Description
I’ve talked about the notion of test description languages quite a bit. A lot of these discussions get into debates about being declarative versus imperative, or focusing on intent rather than implementation. All good things to consider. But such “versus” terminology tends to suggest there is a “right” and a “wrong” when often what you have is “What makes sense in your context.” And you may have to flexibly shift between different description levels. Let’s talk about this. Continue reading Levels of Description
Personal Credibility Strategy for Testers
One thing I often talk with testers about is a prime focus of our work: being credible reporters of useful and timely information in a diplomatically persuasive way. Coupled with that, I’m just coming out of a particular job wherein I feel my career took two steps backward and I’m now in process of regaining my forward momentum. The “steps backward” have to do with personal credibility and it’s why I’ve been silent for a month or so.
Continue reading Personal Credibility Strategy for TestersTesting is Like Writing Fiction
Previously I wrote about the craft of testing and drew some correlations between fiction writing. Here I’ll continue that theme.
Continue reading Testing is Like Writing FictionThere Is No “Non-Functional”
I keep running into testers, and others, who like to categorize testing into functional and non-functional aspects. This needs to stop, in my humble opinion.
Continue reading There Is No “Non-Functional”A Values-Based Approach to Systemic Test Team Problems
I was recently in a work environment where we had literally thousands and thousands of test cases that were stored in a tool called TestLink. A major problem was that there was very little impetus for the testers to ever really analyze all these tests or to ever question if TestLink was the most effective tool to be used. This was due in part to some members of management who, perhaps in fear of bruising egos or seeming too critical, basically said: “What we’ve done has worked.” When the testers heard that, they basically assumed: “Well, that means our testing has been good.” Eventually I came along and essentially argued that our test repository was a mess and that our tool of choice was not the most effective. Here’s a little of what I learned from that experience.
Continue reading A Values-Based Approach to Systemic Test Team ProblemsWhen Business Needs Become Specs That Become Code
There is a distinction I want to make in this post regarding what you change in a test specification and how a test specification itself my change, in terms of the role it provides. That leads into a nice segue about how team roles also change. Here by “test specification” I mean the traditional “feature file” of BDD tools like Cucumber, Lettuce, Spinach, SpecFlow, and so on.
Continue reading When Business Needs Become Specs That Become CodeTest Specifications and Fluid Test Writing
I have been introducing Cucumber to testers who have little exposure to such tools. I was looking at whether The Cucumber Book would be worth having around the office. And while it may or may not be, one thing I notice is that it (like most resources on Cucumber I find) don’t really address some of the heuristics regarding how you can start thinking about writing test specifications.
Continue reading Test Specifications and Fluid Test WritingSpec Workshops, Collaboration, and Test Writing
I’ve found myself in a position lately of having to explain a lot of concepts that are “obvious” to me. I found myself getting frustrated but then I considered my own words regarding the “obvious” nature of Quality Assurance and I realized that maybe I wasn’t establishing the context of what I was talking about. So I took step back and I started to look at whether many of the testers I work with and meet these days are aware of, much less practice, the idea of requirements being tests; of acceptance test specifications that drive development; of specification workshops. As it turned out, no, most testers were not practicing these concepts and many were not even aware of them as a shift in the dynamic of how testing can be done.
Continue reading Spec Workshops, Collaboration, and Test WritingCombining Activities in a Lifecycle Prism
For those of you who work in agile environments, maybe nothing I say here will be new. Even for those who don’t work in agile environments, you may have found yourself thinking along these lines but not necessarily sure of how to articulate it. That’s a challenge I’ve found myself in where I had to explain to people that the process gates you typically see in a “waterfall process” can be accommodated in an “agile process.” So let’s talk about that.
Continue reading Combining Activities in a Lifecycle PrismThe Higher Calling: Testers Building a Base For Knowledge
One thing I can claim to know: as any company continues to grow its quality practices (not just its test practices), its challenges will grow. One of those challenges will be making sure that the company can operate in a so-called “agile” fashion while still building a solid base of actionable knowledge related to quality and testing. So let’s talk about that.
Continue reading The Higher Calling: Testers Building a Base For KnowledgeCars, Shapes, and Tests
I think the future of testing relies less on a sole focus on test execution and more on the ability to write tests in the language of the business domain, effectively tying together the role of business analyst and tester. I think that future also includes the ability of testers to instrument certain artifacts, like requirements documents, so that the requirements, acting as tests, can be converted to different formats, most notably automated tests. There’s a lot of contention out there around these ideas from “purist” testers: those who feel that these attempts provide a single-source test format is getting away from testing and more into development.
While I agree in part that this is putting some focus on development activities, I disagree that this gets away from testing. Effective testing, to me, is about putting testing where it will do the most good in the most responsible fashion. Sometimes that testing is finding new bugs, sometimes it’s providing confidence that bugs haven’t come back. Either way, testing is all about communication.
Continue reading Cars, Shapes, and Tests