The Insperation

As I mentioned in the last post I was having some students over for a visit. They just started their first semester learning about testing. Their assignment was (I think, it was quite fussy for all of us) to visit a company and study and learn how testing worked at the company.

Just a small disclaimer; I think it is great that we have vocational education in Sweden. But I was a bit scared of what they learned.. I met eight young men whom in less than two months have been taught that to be a tester you have to be curious, driven and alert. So far, so good. But they were also taught that you as a tester have to; go over requirements, write test cases and test plans, and from what I understood from them, that would take about 95% of the time. The students seemed a bit concerned that 95% of their working life would be really boring. I get that. It sounded to me that they were told that you should be great! And then do boring ISTQB stuff and test 5% of their time. Needless to say, I had something else to tell them. I told them of how I run my apartment at Blocket, three testers supporting more than 40 developers in eight teams. I told them how I got fed up writing test cases that made no sense at my previous job and introduced Session Based Test Management.

But I also told them that my way of working will perhaps not work in every industry, and not at every company. And that doesn't mean that those companies are  doing it wrong. There are all sorts of reason why a company work the way it works. Sometimes you are forced e.g by government to deliver certain things. Or the company just don't wont to be agile. That is not wrong. It is up to them. But you as a tester has to decide; Do I want to work that way?

I think, and hope that the students saw that there are so many different ways of working with test. No one can judge and say "this is better", YOU have to choose what rocks your boat. In the same way you as tester can focus on exploratory testing or performance testing, you can go to a company that is crazy agile or steady waterfall. None of them are wrong, they are just different. People are different, and need different things. I think it's good that you can choose. The responsibility to choose the right place for you to be the greatest you can be, it's up to you.

After almost three hours the group went home. I hope I inspired them to see that when it comes to testing, you have options. Not everybody has to get on my crazy super agile boat, there are others. But I think I might get a few applications of intern-ships in a near future.  I hope ;)

Over and our, Happy testing!

Spreading the love

I had a great time last week!

In March I attended a great conference, Testzonen 2012 and meet very interesting people there. One of them wanted to come and visit my work place. So last week I had a visit from four agile coaches (all though they thought the term a bit missleading) from Adaptiv. They were interested in how I/we work at Blocket with XP and testing. So we had a tour of our lovely office and an hour of Q&A. I think I had some good answers.

Next week 8 guys that just started an education in testing this semester are coming for at case study. I get to inspire the future! Good times :) More on that when it has happened.

Happy testing

Testing with your programmer

It has been way to long since I shared my thoughts here, which is a shame because the last half year I have had been thoughts about testing and software development. I just had a really nice experience so I thought I just share it.

So, one of the teams has rewritten some functionality, which affects more or less everything. They came to me 2 days ago saying happily as always "We're done!" I started testing and after 30 minutes I had like 15 bugs so I decided they needed some more time. Same thing happend yesterday. And today. Starting to feel that this is not very productive I asked if one of the developers could join me when I was testing, some good old pair testing. After half an hour the developer had written done at least 20 new bugs. But this time he had seen it for him self, what I did to make it happen. And it was really good having him by my side because of course he saw things I hadn't noticed. I really have to start doing this more, especially when it is an iteration that keeps dragging out because new bugs pops up everywhere. Also when you have IE-browsers always acting strange, it is far more effective having your programmer next to you.