Testing the Waterhouse

I got into work this morning, and was looking at some CI Builds, and had a thought that it might be useful to have a bug raised automatically (through an API) when a test that is running on CI failed.... I tweeted about it to get peoples opinion(s)... I got a few responses on twitter, and one which made me rethink why this might be a good idea and that was: It could easily lead to and incredible amount of noise if we are raising bugs against every failed test, and also 1 failed test case != 1 bug, in that if 3 automated tests on CI fail then we don't necessarily need 3 bugs. It could also potentially (as my reply states) devalue what a bug actually is, meaning that if a tester raises a bug then it might get ignored/lost in all the noise.  I also asked our internal QA Slack channel, responses were informative, and again helped lead me away from this potentially noisy and crazy idea. Both of these points are extremely valid, and if you make it the number...

I finally got round to watching the new Star Wars (that's what it's like having 2 kids at home, babysitters are at a premium!!!), and (no spoilers here) but I was interested to see the following line being muttered again during the film! It reminded me of a series of blog posts I done a while back around famous movie quotes that have been said in films and applying them to Software Engineering/Testing... This particular quote has been said in every single Star Wars film so far! (Star Wars trivia for you there!) But for the purpose of this blog post, how does it apply to Software Engineering?  Well, as Testers on a development team/project we get to see things that others perhaps don't get to see, we get to speak to everybody about the product that is being developed, we see it from a technical standpoint, from a business standpoint and from a customer standpoint, we really are in a truly unique position, and this is one of the things I love most about Testing. As a...

At Asos we have a large testing team (30+ testers), they all work within their development teams, and the way development teams work can vary and understandably so. Helping the 30+ testers we have a number of Test Leads, of which I am one, recently we (the leads) all got together to come up with a plan of things that we feel we need to work on/define/have an idea of how to approach them for the next year to help improve our testing standards across the boards and improve the skillset of testers within the teams. To help with this we got together and came up with a mindmap, the plan going forward is for us to take ownership of one of the areas and come up with a strategy/approach/implement actions to help improve the areas and define whatever is needed. There's a lot there, and I'll probably write seperately about each one, and what we're doing, as it's always good to share ideas and get feedback... so watch this space!