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...

Most blogs on test automation are about how to add more and more tests to your automation suite, but rarely does anyone mention that you also should consider removing automated tests, especially those that do not provide any value. If you are on a new and relatively fresh project, you probably focus most on adding automated tests across different layers, focusing on automating regression testing certain parts of your service that you create. As your service mature, you probably have built up a good chunk of automated tests and you keep on adding more and more automated tests as new parts are added. Now instead of 10-15 minutes, your test suite perhaps need 20-30 minutes to run, and it becomes heavier and heavier to regression test new code. (This can probably be solved by other means of course, but consider this an example, there could be more reasons why you have a test-heavy delivery pipeline) Seldom does one consider the possibility of removing tests, not only in order to reduce...

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...