Tag: Reflection

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Experience Reports Ramblings

Reflection: Key highlights as a Quality Coach

I recently reflected upon my failings as a Quality Coach but that wasn’t to say that I failed. Far from it. I am very proud of my work as a Quality Coach and it is a role that I hope to pick up again.

Initiatives

Analytics

As a group we had never really looked at analytics before. It was deemed “too much effort” for our previous application suite given it was often in air-gapped networks (i.e. no way for the data to be sent back to us. However we did bemoan the lack of understanding of our customers.

When picking up a cloud based web application, I latched on to this. First I spoke to people about their challenges and noted how prevalent understanding our customers were. I experimented with Google Analytics and learnt about using it. I then pitched us adapting it, organising some brainstorming and leading to user stories on the backlog… which were then implemented.

I then looked at reporting that data. When we weren’t sure about the importance of fixing a bug, I could point to usage data. When wondering about the impact of a new release, I could point to change in user behaviours. It was useful. We also were using it for our planning to understand when we can try and force customers to switch from an older view to another.

Whilst the developers who did the hard work got the credit (and rightly so), I know full well that I made a difference here.

Refinement & ATDD

Our refinement process had been “grand” for probably around 7-8 years (at least with the teams I worked in). We did lack a little bit of test input at times but generally, not too bad. However when working in a new product area, we had made a few mistakes. We’d misunderstood behaviours, requirements and what is involved. This is why it became a key area for me throughout my time as a Quality Coach.

As it is something I was quite pleased with, I’ll elaborate more in a blog post another time (I have a long “to do” list!), but what I wanted to highlight was that I got testing needs to be considered before starting work. More than that, we also started thinking about the impact of our changes and opportunities for improving quality (including tech debt).

I helped encourage teams to think of edge cases as well, partly by bringing my tester hat and leading by example on asking awkward questions but also I started leveraging my interest in examples, a concept that I’ve explored in manual testing (my first post on here!). Whilst full example mapping sessions felt optimistic, I started getting us to define examples of behaviour and this helped people think of different cases, ask new questions and find that what seemed like a simple change had way more variables. We even managed to take it further in a smaller “standalone” project and implement a process similar to ATDD. I’ll elaborate on this in my separate post but for me, it was a cracking win.

Others

There’s a number of other initiatives that I’m pleased with, which I won’t elaborate on but:

  • Kept unit testing, even in difficult projects where there’s temptation to abandon it, an active area.
  • Started a TDD initiative, including running a workshop with more to come, pairing with an architect (sadly never got a chance to see it through).
  • Meaningful RCAs
  • Collaborative Test Strategy
  • Assessing our levels with different quality attributes (NFRs)
  • We started caring about accessibility (even if unfortunately were told to stop caring)

Coaching & Leadership

Vision

As I started writing about this, I found I had plenty to say, which I’ll follow up in a separate post but one of my personal highlights was setting and sharing a quality vision. The initiatives that I described in more depth above? They are directly tied to part of the vision. We made tangible progress towards a vision. For me it wasn’t a load of fluffy words but integral to what we tried to achieve.

Coaching

Throughout my time as a Quality Coach I tried to develop my coaching skills. I would use retrospectives and RCAs to try and coach developers. Originally I started by trying to coach at a team level (albeit with resistance for taking up team’s time) but eventually got to start having 1:1s with the developers.

Not every session was gold dust but not only was I able to understand people’s challenges better but the developers themselves got plenty of benefit. I was able to explore topics and challenges that went unsaid all too often. As I developed my ability with coaching and asking questions, I was also able to help people solve challenges unrelated to my area of speciality. I got a real kick out of it when I learnt that I’d helped someone solve their problem and I felt it was a positive that people took value from them and were reluctant to decrease the frequency when I was under pressure to reduce the time I spent with the devs in this manner.

Side note: I struggled to sell the value of this coaching.

"When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all"

Summary

Whilst not without its challenges, I am proud of my work as a Quality Coach. Of course I could have done better in certain areas (this is always the case!) but the teams that I work with are definitely better off from my initiatives, leadership and coaching. It makes me excited to think about what I could achieve in my next role.

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Experience Reports Ramblings

Reflection: Key mistakes as a Quality Coach

I enjoyed my time as a Quality Coach, working with between one and three teams at a time. I think it was a relatively successful stint. However I want to acknowledge some of the areas where I struggled.

Role Definition

As a role, quality coaching is definitely very different to anything that I’ve done before and it was also very new within our group. Unfortunately I never really got myself established into what I think would be the ideal Quality Coach role & responsibilities. It was only when I was on gardening leave, reflecting and taking on board a host of great resources that I felt like I had confidence in my own understanding of the role. If you don’t fully understand your place, let alone others understanding it, this doesn’t set you up for success.

Looking back, I just didn’t spend enough time getting people to talk through the challenges and how they can solve them. I always succumbed to pressure and would reduce my involvement, even if it was glaringly obvious to me that we were only going to suffer later.

Ownership

Coaching is largely about helping people make the right decisions and grow. However in my role I tended to own all of our quality initiatives. I owned our test environment & kit. Test strategies not working? I took responsibility to change that. RCAs only happened if I organised them. Talking about testing early, putting together test strategies etc, tended to only happen when I led it.

The knock on effect here is that whilst the team did view quality and testing as a shared responsibility and collaborated in the journey, they didn’t really lead it enough. I didn’t create enough opportunities to empower people. However “in my defense”, I would argue that a bunch of developers were never going to be super enthusiastic about leading change on test strategy.

I’m curious how they’ll get on without me. Have I led by example and left enough of a framework in place for people to carry it on?

Pairing

I’m a shy and socially anxious person. As no one has ever really paired with me, I wasn’t sure how to engage people. Consequently I did no where near enough to push pairing with people, in particular to push pairing with myself. I did do some mob approaches, which seemed easier from a social point of view, and had some successful sessions in those final few weeks and months but going forward this is arguably my biggest area for growth.

Automated Tests

I hate this topic. And this is a problem.

When it comes to quality and testing, most of the talk is around using these tools and I don’t have a lot of experience here. Don’t get me wrong, I am grand with every C# testing framework that I’ve used, explored TDD as a developer and have a good grasp of the theory & concepts. I’ve ran a TDD workshop (using C#) and introduced automated acceptance tests (in a C# windows app), so I’m definitely not clueless. However I don’t know the syntax or best practices with tools like Selenium, Playwright or Cypress.

Consequently as a coach I can really support people in understand what to test, layering and explain TDD & BDD but when a Playwright test isn’t behaving, I’m useless.

Metrics

Another topic that I’ve never quite gotten along with. It is odd as playing with spreadsheets makes me happy but I just couldn’t really see the value in them – at least the ones that I’ve seen. I was interested in using QPAM or QCTG but they had some subjectivity and it felt an expensive meeting to discuss.

However my biggest lightbulb moment came during a lean coffee session for a DORA Community Discussion on metrics. I’d been approaching metrics as an exploratory testing. Looking at data and seeing what I could discover. Instead I needed to be more of a politician. Have a story then gather data to prove it.

Summary

I believe that I was on the right path but needed to be bolder. I should have been establishing metrics to prove that we have challenges with our quality then using that to justify initiatives that I coach people through.

I need to have more confidence (and/or less fear) with pairing and unfortunately I will have to learn some of the modern automated testing frameworks in order to help me succeed in the future.

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Ramblings

2024: Glad That’s Over

It has been a trying year, both personally and professionally. However before I flesh that out, I thought I’d try and articulate everything that has happened for me within the world of testing & quality:

  • I got a new benefit at work: 10% time! This led to me taking time to learn more during working hours.
  • My teams started work on a web browser based product, having been pretty much only working on a thick client talking to devices for years and years.
  • Got to do my first 5Ws & 1H.
  • I created and abandoned a heuristics based app called Test Addict. We used it a couple of times at work.
  • I started a new role as a Quality Coach (which in truth is similar to what I was doing previously, but I cunningly added extra pressure and expectations on myself).
  • We did our first Risk Storming.
  • I attended TestBash UK – this was great!
  • Started creating something cool (but not available yet).
  • Was a guest on my first podcast (but not available yet).
  • Experimented with different ways of doing test strategies, retros & RCAs to get teams engaged.

Big Fat Failure

In my annual review I was quite scathing of myself.

I failed the teams

We started a new project that whilst not greenfield, was full of opportunity. However we’ve struggled with quality with the teams quite damning in their own assessment. Our automated tests are flakey, we don’t have confidence in how we test and the bug count is beyond anything I’ve worked on before (and that is without me doing the testing!). This is without even touching on technical challenges.

Whilst quality is a shared responsibility and there’s plenty mitigating factors (excuses or reasons?), as the Quality Coach you can hardly walk away feeling like you’ve done a good job when it feels like everything is on fire.

Defeated

Throughout the year I’ve tried bringing new ideas and approaches to the teams but I’m not sure how much has really stuck. The second I stopped being the one to run RCAs or write a test strategy, they largely stop. I did get the teams testing for one quality attribute (I won’t name) for the first time, but we were told to side line it. After resisting taking on the state of our lab & kit, I succumbed, did a load of work and 2 months later its a mess again. Our flakey tests are addressed by “oh just run it again”. We did exercises like using heuristics, risk storming and 5Ws & 1H and the feedback was “that was really useful”… but they won’t get repeated. Finally I had a goal around teaching teams exploratory testing and to date I don’t think anyone has written an Explore, With, To Discover charter.

This isn’t me griping. It is a failing on me. I’m meant to be helping the teams have good habits but they aren’t there.

As for why I called this section defeated, well in Q1 & the start of Q2 I was introducing new ideas for planning testing, thinking about testing and testing techniques. Then over the week or so following my late wife’s birthday I got a wave of requests to “back off” and not take up so much of the team’s time on testing/quality stuff. And I did. I gave up.

Broken

As I’d worried a little in last year’s reflection, I’ve been feeling burnt out and haven’t been able to “over achieve” my capacity as I perhaps did in 2023. With the exception of the odd podcast when gardening, I’ve stopped exploring testing & quality in my spare time. I think the fact that I’ve only written two posts during 2024, one about grief and one written one evening during a conference, is quite telling.

Hope

I’ve been pretty bad at acknowledging my successes this year but there have been a few:

  • Teams might not do exploratory testing as Elizabeth Hendrickson describes in “Explore It!” but they are going beyond the ACs and checklists.
  • Teams are engaged when I organise activities like collaborative test strategies, round tables & RCAs (in the past that has felt like a struggle).
    • In fact in Q1 2025 I’m switching teams that I support and the teams expressed disappointment (and concern!) that I wouldn’t be there to lead on quality discussions.
  • Testing is always a topic that we consider throughout the SDLC.
  • I pushed for us to adopt analytics and we did!
  • I’ve gotten better at being a coach as opposed to a teacher.
  • Whilst deprioritized (for now), I did get us looking at new types of testing in our day-to-day.

Generally speaking, I’ve felt like over the past few months I’ve been collaborating with the teams in a positive way. We’re working to solve challenges and started making in roads on the many challenges we’ve faced. When I was previously feeling “unwanted”, I’m now feeling like a valuable resource. Our group of Quality Coaches, spread across the world, are collaborating more too.

I may have felt like everything had fallen to pieces but I’ve been enjoying the collaboration on how we build back.

Perhaps most importantly, I will definitely get myself the counselling I need. I will recover from the neurological effects of spousal grief and hopefully my energy levels too. With that, perhaps we’ll see a Rich resembling something like what existed 740 days ago…

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Ramblings

Success & Grief

I know this isn’t related to testing or quality but I wanted to air it as it does affect my interactions with people and the community.

It has been a year since my wife passed away unexpectedly. Unsurprisingly it was a difficult year and I’ve really struggled. At the same time I’ve had what many might consider a successful year. So how do these conflicting matters combine?

Not great.

My lowest points (since those first few weeks) were coming back from successful conferences and I’ve felt similar after having a really great day with work.

When we succeed, as humans we want to share our achievements and what makes us excited. The natural person would be your closest friend or family member. Both of these were my wife. Consequently when I’ve succeeded, that natural want to share and celebrate has kicked in but I can’t do that with the one person who matters. They are gone. Forever. The high is met by an equal reality crash. It makes me want to run and hide after a good day. From a good day.

This leads to a dilemma. I want to succeed in work and I really enjoy being involved and attending conferences but ultimately they leave me in a darker place. How do I manage this? Other than holding back and not trying to succeed, I really don’t know.

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Experience Reports Ramblings

2023 – A Reflection

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.

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Experience Reports Ramblings

2021 – A year in review

I believe this is a fairly common thing to do and hopefully useful for myself. Lets have a look back at the bizarre year that was 2021.

Key events:

  • Officially became an employee of Motorola Solutions, following a takeover last year.
  • Moved to a new office, which I visited a handful of times.
  • Started a new “secondary role” as a Cyber Champion.

I had a few achievements that I ought to be pleased with:

  • Became involved in cyber security, which involved a chunk of learning theory, running a variety of different types of scans and finally I ran a load of talks for my office during cyber awareness month.
  • I created a new card games called Threat agents and got myself a single copy manufactured.
  • As it has been historically agreed that automating our older, long running programs would be too involving and I was going mad with regressions testing, I wrote my own automation tool. It wasn’t great at reporting results but it did test for stability and found some interesting issues.
  • Changed how we do release testing. It probably doesn’t seem like much but I had been pushing to revamp things for a couple of years and eventually managed to get it implemented.

Whilst there’s plenty positives from the year, ultimately it wasn’t a massive success. I had a couple of big objectives for the year that failed to accomplish:

  • Develop my exploratory testing. I’ve always had the “knack” for finding bugs but I want to learn more about how people do it more professionally. I just need to take the time.
  • Use an off the shelf automation framework for automated UI and/or API testing. I am very confident that this is something I can do, however until I’ve had some proper experience I can’t add it to my CV (even if I’m not a fan of test engineers writing all these tests).

I don’t think I should beat myself up for not managing the above and I certainly don’t want to be giving myself objectives to judge myself by, however it is good to consider what I can hope to achieve in the coming year. For 2022 I want to:

  • Sell threat agents. I’ve had positive feedback for the concept and it seems like selling it might be an easier way to get it out there than sharing for free!
  • Related to this I want to become more experienced in threat modelling. Especially if I am able to give talks on the subject.
  • Improve my knowledge and technique for exploratory testing.
  • Develop my coaching skills. In particular trying to get some of my colleagues on board with some of my ideas and to feel like I’m having an impact.
  • Discover where I fit in the world. Given that automation is all the rage in the jobs market but I prefer manual exploratory testing to try and break the software, what roles are available to me going forwards? Do I have to give up on my ideals? What might lie ahead for me?

If I don’t meet these and have success elsewhere, well so long as I’m going forwards that is all that matters right?