My biggest challenge when switching back to test
Before I start, a bit of background. I started at my current company as a Software Test Engineer. I didn’t really enjoy the very rigid processes that we had in place and felt it didn’t make the most of my creative ability to find bugs. I ended up switching to a couple of other roles before returning to test some 6 years later. In that time a lot of changes have been made.
Whilst not explicitly stated, my team now favour a Context Driven Testing approach to both features and user stories. How we write tests, share them and execute them varies project to project and even user story to user story.
I do like this freedom to choose and adapt my approach, meaning that if I think that more detail & structure is required, I can use that. For user stories where tests are very niche & specialist and won’t ever be re-ran, I can dramatically cut down on documentation, allowing more time for bugs.
However when I joined I was replacing the existing sole tester in the team, having been a developer in a different team. I found it quite challenging to use my limited knowledge/experience in several scenarios.
For example when picking up a fairly regular testing around appliance updates, it would seem logical to use a similar strategy as before. However I don’t fully know the context of those tests. Were they shortened due to a time scale or extended beyond the normal coverage because of risks specific to that update? Was it only manual testing because we don’t have automated tests or is looking at making this our first automated project a blind alley that has been pursued before? Why was this strategy used?
In the end, after consulting with the team I repeated the same test cases on a selection of platforms plus one extra due to a specific risky package update. We suspect that was the logic used previously. As per usual I provided my list of tests, equipment to use in a test plan for the story, which can be looked back on.
However this problem is going to continue to resurface as we try to decide the same the best strategy for this context next time. It is possible that the next person to perform these tests might not be me, or I’ve simply forgotten the thought process and time will be needlessly spent trying to figure out the ideal strategy for this context. Likely the same tests will be ran again, including the extra one that I added. This is a problem we have in a few areas.
To try to resolve the problem we discussed that to help people repeating this are of testing down the line that we should provide a rigid set of instructions on what to run etc. We’d break from CDT for these tests. Not ideal, but saves effort for whoever picks up the testing next time. A user story was created to do this.
Thinking on this matter more, this is a blunt way to “resolve it” and papers over the re-occuring mistake. What I really needed to understand previously was the logic in the previous strategy. Why these test cases? Why these platforms? Why were others excluded?
I still want to provide guidance for testers picking this up down the line, detailing the core tests that you need to run every time. However the solution is to not just have the strategy written on the user story, but to ensure that the logic and reasoning is provided for historical use. This should help the next person to pick up this testing to devise the best strategy for that context.