Skip to main content

The importance of well defined COAs!

All through our lives we get told by people you get out of anything that you undertake what you put in. How can it apply to me as a Tester or as an Engineer?


Well lets start with a rather less than subtle drawing, the above shows that if you put poop (in case my 4 year old son reads this one day) into something you will most probably get poop out. It doesn't matter what that task is, it directly effects the outcome.

How does this apply to me as a Tester? Lets look at a PBI with no COAs? If we took that into a sprint, chances are we will end up with a rubbish outcome, it most probably won't be what the Product Owner wanted and it probably would be littered with bugs, and the time taken to even develop and test that thing would have been far greater than it perhaps should have!


Lets flip it, what if we had a Product Backlog Item (PBI) with well defined, testable and understood Conditions Of Acceptance (COAs) the chances are that what would come out at the end of a sprint would be a well tested PBI that meets the Product Owners requirements.

This is why it is so so important to get well understood, clear concise requirements. Requirements that can be tested and are not open to interpretation. This is also where Behavour Driven Development style language (more on this in a later post, but for now read this here by our very own Oletha Lai) can be useful in ensuring that requirements are well understood by the team!

It can pretty much be applied to so many different things, that it's important to remember, next time someone wants to bring in a PBI for a sprint with no COAs, just remind them, that we will more than likely turn out rubbish as a result! Rubbish in = Rubbish out..... That is of course not to assume that by having well defined COAs that you'll definitely deliver an amazing PBI, but it's a step in the right direction!

Comments

  1. essay writing service australia20 October 2017 at 07:26

    What a well-written, precise and informative article. I enjoyed reading it throughout. I found the example of poop quite funny though. Good luck for your future.

    ReplyDelete
  2. John Driskell11 April 2019 at 09:00

    Hi there! I know this is kinda off topic nevertheless I'd figured I'd ask. Would you be interested in exchanging links or maybe guest writing a blog post or vice-versa? My blog addresses a lot of the same topics as yours and I believe we could greatly benefit from each other. If you are interested feel free to send me an e-mail. I look forward to hearing from you! Terrific blog by the way! building link singapore

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Treating Test Code as Production Code

It's important when writing automated tests to remember that the code you write should be up to production standards, meaning any conventions that you have in place should be adhered to and that it should follow good design patterns. Too many people often say why does it have to be as good as production code, it's "Only" a test, so long as it passes then that's fine... To answer this we need to look at why we want our tests to be written in such a structured and efficient manner: - Maintainability - by making the test code structured and efficient, it becomes far easier to maintain and in doing so changes in the future can happen quickly as the test isn't linked to anything that it shouldn't be and it's easy to understand for a new set of eyes. - Durability - Again by making the tests structured they should be resistant to changes, if you change a variable name for instance then it shouldn't effect the unit test unless it absolutely has to....
1 comment
Read more

Testers: Be more like a Super-Villain!

Who doesn't love a Super Hero? Talk to my son, and he'll tell you how much he loves them, talk to many adults and they'll say the same! Deep down, we all love to be the Super Hero, we all want to save the day! However, I want to talk about the flip side of Super Heroes, the Super Villains... I often play Imaginext with my son, and I (unfortunately?) am nearly always the Super Villain! Be it Lex Luthor, Joker, Two Face, Mr Freeze or The Riddler! These are all great characters and great Super Villains, but why would I want to write about Super Villains? A while ago where I worked, we had a few Super Heroes, people who would be able to come in and "fix" things that had broken and help deliver projects on time. We then shifted, we decided to do away with the Super Hero culture and try and prevent from being in that position in the first place, whilst we didn't go as far as wanting to hire Super Villains, it's definitely a story that has stuck with me and t...
2 comments
Read more

Using BDD and gherkinising your Acceptance Tests

In my post Testing of Automated tests , I mention about a BDD framework which involves using BDD to drive your acceptance tests. BDD stands for Behaviour Driven Development.  One effective method of writing BDD tests are by using a format known as Gherkin language. These consist of Given, When, Thens. The main advantage of the gherkin language is that it's readable by the business, and in an ideal world forms part of the Conditions of Acceptance around a PBI. Also, using a Visual Studio plugin of SpecFlow , you can integrate your Gherkinised COAs into your solution with feature files, and then drive the automated tests, however, for this post I will focus solely on how to effectively gherkinise your acceptance tests. A Feature file consists of a feature outline, which details what the feature file is testing followed by Scenarios and examples (parameters).  The BDD scenarios are made up of a Given, When, Then... These are effectively an initial state (Given), an action (W...
6 comments
Read more