Testing the Waterhouse

In a lot of companies and a lot of articles that I read online, people say that QA is under estimated, that good QA doesn't get noticed enough, and they're talking about it like it's a bad thing? However, I strongly believe that good QA doesn't need to be credited, the fact that people aren't talking about QA is a good thing, it's not just that no news is good news, but far more than that. Let me give you the example of referees in football, if a referee has a good game then he's not going to be talked about, a good referee is a referee who goes unnoticed, doesn't make any bad decisions, and lets the game flow well. People aren't saying that the referee missed a blatant penalty or sent someone off. To liken this to QA, if everything goes well on a project and and the product is released without any bugs and the quality of the software at the end was of a high standard then not very often will someone say the QA was great, I think it comes ...

I was recently asked about a vision for QA over the next 12 months, where would I like QA to be and how am I planning on achieving that... I thought I'd write where I  want QA to be and document the progress over the next year or so, and hopefully achieve most, if not all, of what I want. Firstly, a big problem where I am currently is performance testing, we hand it over at the end of a project to a third party who then run performance tests on it and come back with results, there are a number of issues that are wrong with this, mainly being we are leaving something that is incredibly important right to the end of a project, so any issues are extremely difficult to fix. So the first thing I want to do is embed Performance Testing right into the sprint, and actually try and do it in an Agile way, I read a blog post here   and really want to try and achieve that, we have the tooling to do it in house, so why wouldn't we do so? Sure it will require some help from experts...

I saw this recently on an internet site I visit and it got me thinking about just how true it is... In order to achieve our goals, we more often than not have to step outside of our comfort zone in order to achieve them. What do you do to challenge yourself within QA? I take on things that I don't know much about, and learn about them as I find the best way for me to learn is by doing. A good recent example of this is working with Espresso, a new API from Google for automating tests on android devices. I didn't know anything about this before I started looking at it, and whilst I'm not a pro at it, I have experience of it, I know how to use it, and I know how to write tests using it, which is what I aimed to achieve when I picked it up at first. I'm lucky to be in a position where I can find things that challenge me on a regular basis, however I have to say, that if it ever came that I wasn't being challenged, then I would look for somewhere that was chal...

The above quote as you can see is from Nanny McPhee, and it's as follows: "When you need me but do not want me, then I must stay. When you want me, but no longer need me, then I have to go" I think this applied very much to my role as a QA Lead, I seem to spend time with teams who need me, more than teams who don't. This isn't a bad thing, I know teams that don't need me will do fine without me, and by helping other teams I help improve them and improve their processes. I recently read a blog by James Bach here  and I think this relates to the above, in that I jump (as James says, A Test Jumper) into help teams as and when I can and as and when it's needed, if teams don't necessarily need my help then I will spend less time with them. Every team is different and has different needs and different level of needs. I've also said the above to an Agile Coach we had who blogs here , I often said to her that she's only around whilst w...

Here's an interesting statistic for you (granted from the USA): Huffington Post have labelled being a QA Engineer as the second happiest job in America When I stumbled upon this article, I had to read the list twice, really? Being a QA Engineer is the second happiest job!? Someone had better tell that to some people I work with... I joke ;) What is it that makes this job so happy then? To me, it's the challenge of learning new things on a constant basis, the past few weeks have been spent trying to get my head around Espresso an automation API from Google for Android apps, I haven't spent as much time as I would have liked with it, but it's definitely challenging, and very rewarding. If I get to spend a whole day on it, then that does make me happy, so there's that I suppose. Then there's the opportunities to constantly try and think of better ways of doing things, improving how we test so we can spend more time well, testing. It's rewardin...

I saw a forum post this morning asking the exact same question as above, and it got me thinking about how much my career has changed in the past 5 years, how much QA has changed and how much Software Development has changed. Firstly, it may be a little unfair to compare what I was doing 5 years ago as I had only just started out in testing, so obviously my understanding and appreciation for what I was doing probably wasn't at the level it is today. However, it's still a useful exercise so I can at least appreciate what i have achieved in the 5 years. I started out at a consultancy, Testhouse, where I would be sent out on site to offer my QA expertise in what ever way was needed. The benefit of this was that I got to see a lot of different companies and how they worked. Comparing then to now, there has definitely been a shift left in the QA world, and by that I mean there has been more integration between the actual development and the QA processes, so much so that they are ...

I came across the below this morning, and I thought it would make a lighthearted blog post.... Does this sound like any QA you've ever met? To me it sounds like almost every QA I've worked with over the past fer years! Often however, they have every right to be worried, and it's this worry that drives us to test things to the best of our ability, so it's definitely not something that we should knock out of testers. I think it's important to have the right amount of worry, and to worry about the right things.