Meeleetester

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the test team argued that we were not involved early enough and that we ended testing specifications that were well out of date due to our late involvement.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...

"Up to date" can probably be debated as development in our field change quite fast, and what was ground braking yesterday, fast becomes old news today. I try to read as much as possible, and this usually vary from week to week, day to day due to other obligations, but I squeeze in some hours each week. This is mostly done on the evening, on the way to and back from work, and at work when I have 5-10 minutes until a meeting starts, and I can not start on anything new, I spend that time picking up a blog post or two, and traversing through it. There is a set of blogs I follow, these are mostly from other practitioners in the field software testing / development. All of them are organized in different folders in Feedly , which I use to aggregate the blog posts, news, and other information. Here is a screenshot of the structure that I have. Testing folder contain most feeds from about 50-ish sources, and I have separated some of the blogs into AutTesting (Automated Test...

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...