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!

I was recently watching a TED Talk by Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action ... It's a truly inspiring video, and one that I highly recommend you watching it. Like any great video/speech it got me thinking and trying to apply it to my life/world. As you know a lot of my life/world is around testing and so naturally I started asking myself the following questions: - What helps makes great testers? - What makes people really appreciate the value of testers? Now in the video Simon mentions what he calls "The Golden Circle" which you can find a neat little diagram of below: Using this he helps explain what makes leaders/businesses great, it's not the What of what they are doing? Nor is it necessarily the How ? It is in fact the Why of what you are doing.   If people can connect and resonate with the Why of what you are doing they are going to follow you, they are doing to buy into your product and appreciate the value you bring even you more so. Thi...

I recently (though it seems a long time ago now... as I've just got round to writing this!) had the pleasure of attending the Unicom - 12th NextGen Testing Conference in London, I was lucky in that I won free tickets, so a free conference is definitely appealing! :) I thought it would be good to write a blog post detailing the conference, what I learnt, what I got out of it and if I enjoyed it... The conference itself was chaired by Donald Firesmith , he was over from Pittsburgh, and was chairing the conference and also giving a talk about the Many Types of Testing & Testing Philosophies. Many Types of Testing & Testing Philosophies This was a very interesting talk, and possibly one of my favourites, it opened my eyes a bit, and I've been in testing for 8 years, but there were some types of testing in there that I had not heard about, and even some that I knew of that weren't included (which I had a chat with Donald about afterwards and agreed that they shou...

We were in a meeting the other day, and someone in the meeting, said something that is one of my pet hates, "It's not my job" ... This confused me, we are talking about delivering quality software as part of a team, and anyway that someone can add value in that team to deliver the ultimate goal is important, regardless of what their job title is. This then lead me to think about how testing has changed over the past 5 years, and how I see it as a constantly evolving role, and it reminded me of something that I read about recently and wanted to blog about called Holocracy , it is about a method of running organizations and so it's given me a kick up the backside and here's the blog post.  It has some core principles, and these are: Flexible Organisation Structure - With Clear Roles defined around the work and not about the people. People can often take on a number of Roles in a company.... More Autonomy to Teams & Individuals - Teams and individuals solv...

We recently held a community session where we completed a little exercise to get people to think about the different layers of testing, and the different types of testing in the hope that it would get their brains thinking and applying it to real life scenarios in their project and team work. The exercise was one we had done before many years ago, but seeing as we had new starters, and not many people left from all those years ago, I felt it would be appropriate and useful to do it again. It was to take a set of instructions for the assembly of a chair and look at the different types of tests that we could apply to it to ensure it worked as expected. The instructions were these: It was a pairing exercise, to carry on the theme from previous sessions, and to get people collaboratively working together with people they might not normally work with, and I gave them the instructions and told them how would they test it, what types of tests would they perform and where. I was exp...