rethinking the role of testers in agile and structured projects

Rethinking the Role of Testers in Agile and Structured Projects

Paul Gerrardpaul@gerrardconsulting.comTwitter: @paul_gerrardWeb: gerrardconsulting.com

Slide 1Intelligent Testing, Improvement and Assurance

Theme:Changes in our

business demand a re-think of where

testing fits in systems projects

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Slide 2

Health Warning!I’m going to generalise quite a lot

because I’m talking about the market in general.

YOU may be an exception; these trends are happening outside testing

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Slide 3

(Why) is a re-think required?

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gerrardconsulting.com - some stats

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• Even after 15 years, the IEEE 829 ‘sample test plan’ is the most popular download on our site (1434 per month)

• Was it such a good paper or are people stuck in the 70s/80s?

Old style formality hasn’t advanced• Countless books available• 100,000+ certified testers• Conferences, gatherings, forums, SIGs all

over the world• But certification seems to have more critics

than supporters these days– Beginners are put on courses to get the tick-in-

box– Experienced folk don’t usually have a good thing

to say about certification– Its an easy target.

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The new testing squeeze

• Developers are beginning to take test-first, unit-testing, continuous integration very seriously (at last)

• Better testing up-front (what we’ve always wanted)–More stable software sooner– Functional/structural coverage ‘upstream’

• But do better developer practices remove the need for system testers?

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The new testing squeeze 2

• Larger/structured projects treat testing as a factory process (to be offshored mostly)

• Promoting standards and the certified way is consistent with factory processes

• But the same old, bad old attitudes prevail:– Anyone can test, so do it on the cheap

• Offshoring leaves certified, unskilled testers without a role – maybe its for the best?

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The new testing squeeze 3

• Some Agile projects squeeze testers out completely – the developers and product owners can test, can’t they?

• More often, testers are coerced into being eyes/ears of the stakeholder

• This is a good thing but…– Is it testing? Can our testers, test managers

cope?– Agile testing = Test Assurance in the small?– A different set of skills are required.

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Agile is here to stay

• Many (most?) people are still waiting for Agile to just ‘go away’ – it won’t

• A certified generation of testers rely on:– Having time to do ‘a good job’ whatever that is– Specifications, requirements (available and stable)– Tabulated test cases, test procedures– Test design techniques that rely on perfect specs.– Test management tools that support practices

dating back to the 60s

• But Agile is getting all the attention and it simply doesn’t work this way.

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A methodological shift…

• There seems to be a methodological shift from staged to iterative and now ‘continuous’

• Just as companies seem to be coming to terms with Agile…

• They are now being invited to consider continuous ‘Specification by Example’ approaches

• Specification by example promotes a continual process of specification, exampling, test-first, and continuous integration

• Where does the tester fit here?Intelligent Testing,

Improvement and AssuranceSlide 13

Specification by example

• SBE promises much:– Consistent requirements, stories/examples tests

and code for the lifetime of a product– Extremely rapid end-to-end turnaround – 24hours– CI is the heartbeat, life-support and early warning

system

• Of course, workflow, user experience and end-to-end testing are required

• But these can be managed by business analysts, UX experts and the stakeholder community.

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The testing ‘crunch’

• Testing is being squeezed:– From the ‘low-value’ norm of unskilled teams…– To upstream, business-savvy, workflow-

oriented, UX-aware testing experts, with new tools

• BAs who can test… or testers who can BA• How many of the current generation of

testers and test managers will cope with this change?

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‘The purpose of testing is to locate defects’ ?• This stood in good stead in the 80sand 90s• But stakeholders (all of them) know that avoiding

defects is better than finding them– Standard test approaches are good at providing the

documentation (sort of) but are an inefficient way of detecting defects

– Exploration is effective but happens at the end

• “Let’s take requirements more seriously, let’s get the devs to test, let’s offshore the paperwork”

• Testers need to understand they are in the information business.

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Predictions

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#1Half of the current

onshore testing community will see their job disappear

in the next five years.

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#2Business test planning will

become part of up-front analysis and design (where it

should be)Intelligent Testing, Improvement and

AssuranceSlide 19

#3Functional unit

testing driven by stories (mostly)

Structural testing defined by developers

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#4Requirements and business models

will become ‘executable’

through stories and examples

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#5Some system tests

and most acceptance tests

will be model-driven

(models created by analysts)Intelligent Testing, Improvement and

AssuranceSlide 22

#6Business models plus stories and examples will

increasingly be ‘contractual’

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#7System Test

detailing – the creation of

executable manual tests will be outsourced

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#8Manual system test

execution will be outsourced (and in

the cloud)

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#9Maybe half of all acceptance tests will be automated

in CI……foreverIntelligent Testing, Improvement and

AssuranceSlide 26

#10New tools will emerge that

manage requirements,

stories, scenarios, workflows,

prototyping and testing

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Recommendation

Take a long, hard look at where your future lies

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#1Upstream with

stakeholders and analysis – providing

testing and assurance skills to

businessIntelligent Testing, Improvement and

AssuranceSlide 29

#2Managing the

Business Requirements

knowledge base; analysing business impact of change

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#3Providing an

assurance function to teams, projects,

and business stakeholders

(“testmaster”)Intelligent Testing, Improvement and

AssuranceSlide 31

#4Managing the

information flows to/from

development teams and the CI

processIntelligent Testing, Improvement and

AssuranceSlide 32

#5Managing/

monitoring offshore resources who

detail and execute tests

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Slide 33

Shameless Plug

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Business Story Method™

The Method, to be published in booklet form in early

December, supports this vision

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Our Story Platform implements the Business Story

MethodMaelscrum for Agile

Business Story Manager for Structured

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Slide 37

Want to evaluateBusiness Story Manager or

Maelscrum?

Visit…maelscrum.com

businessstorymanager.com

Thanks once again

Rethinking the Role of Testers in Agile and Structured Projects

Paul Gerrardpaul@gerrardconsulting.comTwitter: @paul_gerrardWeb: gerrardconsulting.com

Slide 38Intelligent Testing, Improvement and Assurance