Meeleetester

This year I attended my second EuroSTAR , in Haag, the Netherlands. Last one was 5 years ago in Gothenburg, so it was about time to re-visit this conference. The conference lasted 4 days, where the first 1,5 days were workshops, and 2,5 days of conference, talks and key notes - with a lot of social happenings and expo during the breaks. We were 5 in total from my company that attended the conference. Monday First day I attended a whole day workshop with Michael Bolton, "Analysis for Testers", which was very educative and reminded me to keep looking at the big picture and context of what we are testing. There were a couple of assignments that we did in the classroom, in groups, and while they could appear to be easy and straight forward, they created quite a lot of debate among the participants. Even though all in all this workshop was educative and fun, there were some improvement points that I will suggest for Michael, like having more group assignments during the middle ...

We all have been reading headlines and articles about cars that have been recalled due to certain failures, and the numbers of cars that needs to be delivered to local car shops are always quite high. A quick Google search shows articles like BMW recalls 300.000 cars , Kia recalls 500.000 cars , Fiat recalls 4.8 million cars , this list could be as long as you want it to be. Recently Tesla's model 3 were tested by Consumer Reports , a nonprofit organization providing product ratings and reviews, and they ended up not recommending this model due to issues with Tesla's stopping distance which were almost 50 meters when braking at about 100 km/h. This was far worse than any contemporary car tested by the magazine and about 2 meters longer than the stopping distance of a Ford F-150 full-sized pickup .  Tesla, instead of recalling this model, which has more than 400.000 pre-orders (at this point I was not able to find out how many were already sent out from the factory), they p...

For a long time, at least over the last decades, testers have been implicitly considered to be responsible for testing the service that is developed. After each development cycle, which lasted many weeks and months, followed a cycle of testing, which lasted for some weeks, and then the service was released to production to the end-users. If the version happened to contain any serious bugs, testers were usually "blamed" for not discovering this during the test phases. But why was this a common (mis)understanding for a long time, and perhaps still is in some companies? Why are not developers blamed for introducing the bug in the first place, product owner for not being specific enough when explaining what the end-user wanted, or was it the end-user that was unclear in his or her description of the feature? Why do we even bother pointing fingers on a specific role? At the end, the end-user or the customer is always right. If they experience an issue with the service that you c...

This week I have been looking a bit into whether language(s) we speak, shape the way we think? Being raised up bi-lingual from the age of 8, where I spoke mostly Bosnian and Norwegian with a good addition of English, this is quite an interesting topic for me personally. Inspired by a talk from Lera Boroditsky from TEDWomen 2017, who had done a lot of experiments on this, here is what I found out. If you find this interesting, I encourage you to take a look at the presentation, many examples that I mention here are taken from her talk. 7000 languages, different way of thinking? There are about 7000 languages, each different from one another, in many ways, different sounds, different vocabularies, not at least different structures, to mention a few differences. Whether a language affect how we think has been debated throughout the centuries. "To have a second language is to have a second soul", stated Charlemagne, which is quite a bold statement suggesting that language is ...

We all have heard about the leaning tower of Pisa , mostly known for its unintended tilt. I had the opportunity to visit the tower some years back and was actually surprised by the surrounding site around the tower, the Cathedral, the Baptistry, and the Monumental Cemetery. In my eyes these parts of the " Piazza dei Miracoli " were much more astonishing in beauty than the tower of Pisa, but I have never heard about these parts in Pisa. Having my "tester" hat on, I soon realized that I only had heard about the most famous mistake in construction history, and that the town was mostly known for this mistake, overshadowing the beauty of rest of the site. A quick overview of construction of the tower Construction of the tower occurred in three stages over 199 years, starting in 1173. The tower began to sink after construction had progressed to the second floor in 1178. This was due to a mere three-meter foundation, set in weak, unstable subsoil, a design that was fl...

So where to shift now that testers are part of reviewing the business cases, participate in creation of user stories and backlog grooming, have the ability to use monitoring in different environments, and everything in between, meaning participate in different parts of the software development and delivery life cycle? Well, I think that we could benefit a lot from trying to look at where we generate mistakes. If we sum up the development life cycle, regardless of how often you release, or whether you follow a  waterfall, agile, or devops approach, it all starts with some ideas, business cases, requirements on a higher level, before going into the process of refining the requirements, developing, testing and releasing the changes to the end-users. We previously shifted left and right trying to mitigate and correct issues that occur along the way in the process, without looking into where these mistakes originated. All of the ideas or requirements start in someones mind, with all...

2010 - a full year in, "if testers are not involved early, we do not want to be involved later" After being employed full-time for a year or so, we finally completed a full circle of releases, both the major releases involving a full scaled up beta/pilot program, and some minor releases, as this was taking place on a yearly basis. After each ended project, a small group of people from different teams formed a retrospective team, to go over what was done good and what could be done better next time, for all projects individually but also as a whole. This was before any agile methodologies were introduced. During the retrospective, or post-mortem analysis I think it was called at the time, we from the test team argued that we were not involved early enough and that we ended testing specifications that were well out of date due to our late involvement. This was taken into consideration and that from next phase we were to be included in all start up meetings, and walkthroughs...

Today it is almost unthinkable, with the teams that I work with every day (read - in my context), that some team members inside a software delivery team are not involved in almost every phase of the software development life cycle. Looking back some years ago it was certainly not like that, specially for testers. In this, and the coming posts I will share some of my experiences and thoughts on this subject as well as what I believe where we should shift in the future;  left, right, or even more left, and right... 2007 - The first experiences, part-time tester, waterfall I started to work with software testing in 2007, as many of us in the field, by chance as a part time tester. At this point the company that I worked for did not have any full time dedicated testers, only a team of part time testers who rotated, and worked at least 2 days a week. The team consisted of students studying economics or computer science at master level, who could work at any time of the day/night, ...

Some time ago I read the book "Thinking Fast and Slow" by professor and Nobel prize winner, Daniel Kahneman, which is about the biases in our intuition, that we assume certain things automatically, in an instant, without having thought through them carefully. In many situations it is perfectly fine to act instinctively, but in others we should activate rest of the mind. In this blog post I will try to relate some of the topics that he touches upon in his book, to our field of software testing and development. My initial idea was that I would fit most of the topics into this blog post, but upon revisiting the book, I feel that there are way too many topics of interest covered in his book, and by going into all of them, this blog post would most likely result in another book, rather than a blog post. So I will only cover some of the topics. If you have not read his book, find it and set aside some time to read it. Read it fast and slow, it is truly an amazing book with a...

Some years ago I considered starting a blog, writing, taking notes for myself publicly, sharing these and other ideas, I obviously did not get very far as it always seemed to be the wrong time to start. There were many reasons for not starting (some good ones too), mostly it was time consuming. I usually have many "balls in the air", and adding one more just seemed like something that I would not complete or follow up on, without any external factors helping or pushing me. Just a month ago, in December, I was discussing some issues with Anssi ( http://hellofatester.blogspot.no/ ) and during the discussion we touched into the theme of writing blog posts and sharing, and that both Anssi and I wanted to write more, in my case start to write. Coincidentally I read a blog post just prior to the meeting, where the author of that blog post, to which I'll hopefully find the link to and share later, explained that they were two colleagues that pushed each other to write mor...