Category: Experience Reports

It has been some year. I started in a dark place with lots of change underway. However it is, professionally speaking, been a bit of an immense year.

Speaking

Building upon my first time speaking at a testing conference in 2022, I’ve been fairly active. From running a threat modelling workshop for a small set of people at an Edinburgh MoT meetup to tackling a new topic within security at TestBash UK with a range of activities, it has been really positive. I’ve started feeling like I’ve gotten my name out there and importantly, people seem to like what I’m sharing.

Whilst it can be an exciting (yet nerve wracking) experience to speak and of course having positive feedback and comments makes you feel great, I think the biggest buzz is when people take something away. Speaking always seemed way out my comfort zone but my passion for the topics drove me to give it a go. Consequently when it goes well and you think people are learning and will try out things themselves, it makes it all worthwhile.

Awards

Building upon my speaking, I took my Threat Agents game to a cyber security event for my work. We used it in the threat modelling workshop and I spoke a little and got involved in helping people. I even got a special award within my work for contributions to threat modelling!

Somehow, despite only working part time for a chunk of the year, I’ve managed to achieve a few awards from work, given by peers. This obviously means a lot. However I think a lot of it comes down to…

An Interesting Role

This year I’ve taken on a new role. Whilst I originally dubbed it as a “Free Range Tester”, in reality it has been a senior test engineer who doesn’t test. I have tried to both lead and support.

It was a difficult start and a frustrating one. Quite quickly I learnt why we were struggling to ship a release. I was also distracted with extended leave, reduced hours and helping run our intern program (I even wrote some code!).

But the role has gone well.

My crowning achievement has been my work on analysing our quality for the first major release in a long time. We analysed bugs, reflected on our challenges and took actions. I brought all this together into a presentation (not given, just shared).

For example, whilst a large portion of bugs were attributed to internal mistakes when working on stories, several issues we found, raised and fixed were actually legacy behaviour. We made the software better through these bugs. That is good to know.

It has been quite interesting having this roaming role and getting involved with different teams. As we no longer have a scrum master, I’ve helped fill a little of that void. I’ve had the opportunity to learn how different teams are working and help them with their challenges.

I’ve also been there to help teams out when they are stuck on testing. Who would have thought that getting rid of testers would impact a team’s ability to plan their testing?

I’ve also had the opportunity to get myself involved with the wider organisation. Whilst I’m a shy & timid person most of the time, ask me for my opinion and I’ll give it. And even when I wasn’t asked, I sometimes offered it. Having a culture where anyone, either senior leaders or that weird new tester guy across the ocean, can speak up is wonderful and I definitely appreciate it.

Whilst I haven’t succeeded in getting the organisation to test better, I have raised awareness. I have got allies. This won’t happen overnight but I am confident that in time we’ll get there and what is exciting is that I think I’ll be involved and part of this.

It is a real step forward.

A step back

Unfortunately not everything has been coming up amazing.

I fear that I’ve lost my appetite for actually doing testing. Given how much I love the profession (I’ll post about that separately later), whenever I have some free time to do testing, I’ve often found myself not bothering. I’ll admit that I’ve often found myself reaching over to my Xbox controller when I could, and should be testing. I’ve found excuses not to do actual testing myself. Some of that is semi legit (“managing my energy levels”) but also I know that a bit of the hunger is gone.

Part of this is not having the domain knowledge of the past. Moving to a new, large area when outside a team has made on-boarding very hard. I’ve found it massively overwhelming to try and test a feature that I don’t know, which is part of a very complicated solution full of TLAs and systems named after random comic book characters… and my energy levels & brain capacity are both low.

Strongly held opinions that are easily changed

One other thing that I wanted to reflect upon my opinions and ideologies. I’ll write a separate post about it in due course, but I started the year feeling pretty certain about how things should work but have come to be more flexible over time this year. Maybe there is method in the madness?

Perhaps I was wrong to loathe test strategies so much. I wonder if those times when I was doing copy paste reports that no one really read or cared about tainted me too much?

Challenges ahead

Next year scares me a little. I feel like I’ve over achieved this year and despite knowing I’ve not worked and pushed as hard as I could have, there’s nothing left in the tank.

It has been a draining year.

Next year I think rather than trying to excel and push, I want to build stronger foundations. A wonderful new hire within my work means that I don’t need to push. Just be there to support and be involved.

I am hoping that I won’t need to push to get involved, to get the testing mindset involved, as before. I’ll be there by default. My challenge will be, how do I provide that coaching now that I’m present?

To achieve this I will need to learn how better to coach and help the teams develop their testing. Thankfully we now have 10% time at work so that will be my focus. Having a day each sprint that I can dedicate to the coaching side of things – either by getting time with devs to try new things or just researching & learning, it will help a lot.

However most importantly, I do want to test again. I love testing. I want to find that drive in me again to go try and find those hard to find bugs. To remind everyone what it means to be a tester.

Revenge of the Gatekeeper

For the past couple of months I’ve spent half my time, which is in itself reduced following complications, as a “QA Champion”. A title I dislike. In particular I dislike how QA tends to be associated with the testing best described as “checking” and “QA monkeys” running “test scripts”.

The organisation that I joined as “QA Champion” (I’ve died a little more inside when writing that) has had quality issues, especially since a re-org tried to move us into a LeSS structure with dev teams taking on quality and testing. This was first done by getting rid of testers (well not quite) and trying to shift the QA left to do QA earlier. Everyone needs to be doing some QA, not just the QA teams that still sort of exist. We plan to solve this by automating all the QA.

Ignoring the “automation solves everything” part and the fact that we are working on an old tech stack that lacks testability, I have real issues with our approach.

Let’s have a quick prequel first.

My understanding is that our old methods were that testing was thrown over the fence to teams who ran lots and lots of test cases then produced reports and would be the authority on whether we can release. In other words QA as the gatekeepers of quality. To me this is the dark side and rightfully needs defeating.

So why the ranting, rambling blog post? Surely I should be happy that we’re abandoning this? Well no. I’ve found that the QA Champion is sod all to do with championing quality and we’re the new gatekeepers of quality.

What have I become?

A New Hope

As bleak as it may seem, a shift in the balance may be happening. I’m hoping that I’ve awakened something within the QA Champion group so that we can become a force for good.

I’ve started something of a rebellion. Through a tech talk I shared what I think continuous testing, shift left and quality engineering, all that goodness, could look like for us. With passionate discussion (or constant whining), I’ve got discussions going where I think that there is a strong alliance to bring around change.

My goal is built on two pillars right now.

First is with the teams that I immediately work with, we are looking to use practices to help us test continuously and build quality into our day-to-day. This hasn’t been a hard sell because:

• There’s a strong desire to improve quality where possible.
• I’ve said that I’ll have their backs in rejecting the initiatives coming from above (i.e. the ways of the dark side).
• Many of us have worked together. Some of them taught me what I’m now passing back.

Secondly I am continuing to raise the discussion on what I believe to be the right practice and challenging things like “let’s get teams producing reports detailing all their testing for an epic”. I hope to change the language and expectations from management so that they aren’t looking for the same sort of gatekeeping as before. If they want us to be potentially shippable, instead of going through the arduous and prolonged hardening and release processes seemingly non-stop, lets focus our energies on employing quality engineering.

A Force Awakened

So far I’ve had mixed feelings about my progress. There are moments of hope and feeling like there’s positivity and receptiveness to this, followed by a request for dev teams to run hundreds of manual test cases each in a hardening phase for an internal release.

However I’ve now shared our new approach in the latest sprint review. We’ve had lively and positive discussions about how we can actually get to this stage. Things may actually start coming together.

I will wrap up this post by saying that if the next month or so goes well, I hope to get my job title changed from Senior Test Engineer and get the QA Champion program re-branded.

Hopefully this tale will end with the rise of the Senior Quality Engineer.

(sorry)

During my time as a developer I generally produced a good quality of work. My knowledge of design patterns may not have been very good but I tested my stuff to ensure that it did what I expected it to and that is why there was generally a low bug count for my work… But there was a bug count.

Given that I am very confident in my testing skills (more than my dev skills!), how was it that I missed things in my dev testing? In this blog post I hope to explore that topic.

I believe there are four reasons why we may miss things in our dev testing and push code changes with bugs:

• Blind Spots: Being human we will have cognitive biases or a tendency to miss certain edge cases. There are things that at first I would miss frequently and therefore got more attention in time. Mine was writing incomplete log messages where.

• Laziness: Most developers want to be writing code so we can be tempted to get our code pushed as quickly as possible in order to move on to the next thing. Certain aspects of testing may be areas where we get slack or cut corners. I mostly got slack around install/upgrade. Yawn. (See also I get bored)

• Iterative: My approach to development is very iterative. Sometimes I’ll use TDD and sometimes unit tests come a little later but I’ll always manually test my code as I’m working on it. In theory this is great but I’m not going to re-test everything on each iteration. Occasionally this meant that I missed finding out that I broke something.

• Scope: I don’t believe dev testing should include things like system, load, soak or other more involving tests. If there’s a high time investment to test various scenarios, rather than having two people repeat the same testing, we will often cover the highest risk tests in dev testing and leave the rest for the test phase. There is some testing that is best done by the person testing a completed user story / feature. Consequently it is quite reasonable that developers can exclude certain testing from their dev testing.

(oh hey, BsLIS, or BLISS – lets say I meant that)

So there are some understandable reasons for us to end up blissfully pushing bugs. How do we solve it?

To some extent, I don’t think we need to do anything special.

This is the reason why we (should) have dedicated test phases of a user story’s life. Ideally by working within teams where testing is completed by the development team (possibly by a dedicated tester) then you can build up the relationships, understand each other and catch these things immediately.

As a tester I like to try and get to know my colleagues and how they work. I like to understand what mistakes they may make, as well as thinking about what mistakes I may make. If we can understand and appreciate how these bugs can slip through dev testing, we can catch them easier.

Obviously if you know your flaws then it is good to work on them. If testing exposes your blind spots, try to force yourself to be more aware of them. Using techniques like TDD allows us to ensure, at least at a unit test level, that our iterative changes aren’t breaking our previous work. Also lean on your colleagues and your testers. If bugs are raised against your software, ask yourself why you missed it. Mistakes happen. It’s fine – especially if we’ve caught it before shipping.

My one final note is that it is OK to knowingly not manually dev test an area of code, so long as we clearly communicate not only what we’ve tested and but also what we’ve knowingly not tested. Writing automated tests also lets you flex your scope on manual dev testing.

Dev testing doesn’t need to be perfect. Instead communicate, be clear and work together. The team can be way more than the sum of its parts.

In late September I attended my first in person testing conference, TestBash UK.

I’ve previously been to online events, in person agile and development conferences and an alternative style event – TestBashX Edinburgh, but this was especially exciting.

I was attending as a speaker.

Life Goals

Now before I talk more on my actual experience as a speaker, I want to go back a few years. Throughout my life, my career decisions have been to put myself in a position where I can make a difference beyond the team. To do something people may care about. Whether it was the industry when working in games, becoming an “expert” in the growing ONVIF field or my ideas around “Behaviour-driven Lean Testing”, it all boiled down to one thing.

I wanted to do *something*. To be *someone*. The idea that I could meet a stranger and for them to know of my work was a big dream.

(I know, groan)

When I created my Threat Agents game I wasn’t sure of its value initially but people were very excited by it. Jump forwards less than a year and I am attending TestBash UK as a speaker.

Anxiety

As the event drew closer, I started getting nervous. I didn’t know anyone there. I have social anxiety and whilst speaking didn’t scare me (too much), turning up at a conference did. That first moment of walking up to the bar to have a drink with people, I was trembling.

However what struck me and made it such a wonderful event was how welcoming and friendly everyone was. If I spent longer than 2 minutes looking like a deer in headlights, someone would come over and introduce themselves. When looking for a seat, I’d be invited over.

I got to meet so many lovely people. There were folk from throughout the UK and beyond, each with different levels of experience, from someone new to testing to a veteran over decades. I spoke to many people with a mix of skill sets and different passions within testing.

Pride

My talk was (not unsurprisingly) on threat modelling, in particular my journey getting into threat modelling and how I’ve brought it to my team.

I’d been practising it over and over, walking around my living room whilst speaking to an empty sofa. How would it feel doing this in front of people? Especially because I’m a very anxious, shy and nervous person (at first).

There was only way to go about it – go for it. Embrace it.

After (hopefully no longer than) 30 minutes my talk was complete. The crowd had laughed at my jokes, applauded my video and gave a positive response. I was beaming afterwards! The following day I ran my workshop and people warmed to it really well. My favourite moment of the entire conference was just listening in on one of the groups and hearing a perfect example of a threat modelling discussion.

It was the proudest few days of my life, other than my wedding of course.

And the exciting part is that I’m not done there…

Takeaway Express

If anyone is reading this and hasn’t attended a conference before then I’d thoroughly recommend it. Not only do you get to attend great talks (and often also workshops etc) but networking is a huge part of what makes an event so great. I’d always thought that “networking” with people would be like my initial experience and impression of LinkedIn – trying to promote yourself on the jobs market – but it is so much more. It is a great mixture of socialising and learning with maybe a dash of schmoozing along the way.

Many people view testing as a checkbox exercise where you spend a chunk of time writing what you plan to test to verify the ACs (basically re-wording the ACs) and what you will regression test. This may be in test cases or tasks/comments on a story. Once reviewed/shared, the tester of the story would then go through these one at a time and check them off.

One advantage of this is that you are less likely to miss something for forget to check that a certain behaviour works. The other advantages are, well actually I don’t have a scooby. You can give them to anyone that can follow instructions I guess?

It probably isn’t a surprise to hear that I’m not fond of this approach.

This is where I babble on about exploratory testing right? Well no.

My preference isn’t quite exploratory testing as per the text books. I will have an idea of what I need to test and I may jot a few bullet points to remind myself. These aren’t as detailed as charters, lacking the clear scope and purpose in them. Instead these bullet points will serve as a reminder for if/when I get side tracked.

As I use the software and a new feature, it can often quickly become clear what it pretty bullet proof and what could be a little bit more flakey. Based on the story, my experience of the software (and software in general) plus knowledge of previous bugs I can identify the risks as I go. If I’m being effective in my testing, I can quickly adapt and refocus my efforts so that most of my time is spent trying out behaviour that is most likely to be broken.

Bringing this back to how some colleagues think that testing should work, when doing the more rote testing you might spend 50% of your time testing what the developers have already tested. On top of that you’ll probably be testing behaviour that through usage of the software you’ll see anywhere.

I feel like there’s a lot more value in just using the software. You can use heuristics, notes or charters to guide you but don’t give equal weight to code that never yields bugs compared to an area where there’s more likely to be bugs. I try to avoid having to explicitly test the more basic / core ACs. In most cases I will hit these as part of my exploration and testing.

After all, most interesting functional bugs tend to be a result of behaviour that wasn’t called out in the ACs or planning.

(This assumes the tester is involved throughout the SDLC, as they should be)

The other thing of course that any good tester will do is learn.

Software can be very complicated and it can be quite rare that everyone is an expert on using every single feature, protocol and so forth within the solution. Quite often I will be learning something new about the software, Windows or tooling. As we experiment we may find that the operating system has a nuance or configuration option that you previously weren’t aware of or find a piece of related functionality that hasn’t received much love in a while and no one thought about how it responds to the changes in your user story.

There is also the behaviour that may not be captured in the ACs. I wouldn’t expect the ACs to detail the expected behaviour every single possible scenario that could occur (you could be writing ACs until the end of time). Through your exploration you will hopefully be asking yourself questions that weren’t asked back during planning (especially before you’ve seen it for real). Just because no one asked the question, finding out the answer can still be valuable and insightful. It may be that the behaviour in some circumstances “doesn’t matter” as far as the Product Owner is concerned for the feature to ship, however it can still be worth sharing with them.

A learning isn’t necessarily just “this is odd” or “I have a new skill”. It may be that your new button correctly handles OS themes, even if your app doesn’t have it as a requirement.

In my opinion a good tester, after a day of testing will have more to say than “ACs all passed”.

As a bit of a silly example of what I mean in all this waffle, let’s say I was testing a video game that has added the ability to walk around in a user story. Do I need to study the ACs? A lot of it is hopefully obvious. Perhaps I’ll make a quick skim read and jot a few notes. The second I get in I might use the left thumbstick to move around. I’ll no doubt go in a bunch of different directions. What about other buttons/sticks? As I use it, can I notice speed differences depending on how much I tilt the stick? What happens if I spin it? If I bring up the Inventory added previously, does my character run around as I am picking my items?

After a little while I’ll have a good feel for it. I’ve possibly found a few issues with it and have a few notes. I can then go back and properly read through the ACs. No doubt I can tick off most of the ACs already and can then look at verifying the remaining ACs as well as exploring the areas that aren’t working as expected – or aren’t defined in the ACs. For example if I found that the inventory has issues, what more can I do?

So hopefully that explains how I think a skilled manual tester is most effective and useful when they are using their knowledge, experience and heuristics to define their testing and letting it evolve based on what they find, not dictated by a fixed list.

As a short note, recently I was involved in a nasty support case. After finding the bug, I was tasked with giving an estimate in getting a fix out. In doing this I called out the sorts of testing that would be required. A day or two later I was quizzed as to why I hadn’t written up a proper test plan yet. My response – I wasn’t planning on writing one. I never do. I think we were equally horrified with each other with the Tech Support manager thinking I was lazy & not treating it seriously with me wondering why I was stuck back in the dark ages.