Tale of a tester

What's next for us?

I am a tester and was 10 years ago as well. And yes, we used the famous Waterfall model. It was good for us because we did not know anything about Agile. We were waiting for the developers for weeks (months?) and tried to prepare for all the challenges which could have ruined our life when the product arrived the first time to us. It took one (1) week to build the first version of the application and then developers just kicked the code over the wall to the testers and went to have a coffee. Or two. And a table-tennis match as well. Or two. The testers said: "...this something (meaning: the first build) can not even be deployed, can you take a look at it?" Devs abandoned the match with sour faces and fixed the deployment bug. This time they even tried out the deployment process before passing it to the test team. It took another week, of course. And we finally were able to start testing...finding a couple of A-level, blocker bugs in the first ten minutes. Automation? Er...what are you talking about? This is not Toyota!

And then some mysterious wanderer arrived from the mysterious North. Blond hair, blue eyes, finnish accent, big ego. OMG, what's next for us? 

He said: "I need three developers and three testers from this big group to try something new out. Protesting is prohibited." Of course I applied. I did not want to but somehow my hand was high up in the air, waving widely. That was my dark subconsciuos tester in my mind, I guess.

I did not regret it, as it turned out. But one of the developers shouted: "I will never have a standup in every single morning! Never! This blondie can go back to the North!" 

Now he is our Agile guru. Yes, things have changed. And people as well. 

So we started with a small group and all the others continued the Waterfall stuff. We had a meeting every day, we had estimations and retrospective meetings. It was very exciting. The others were just laughing at us and sleeping...sorry, working hard. 

But it worked. Slowly we became the group to follow. Others wanted to join so we created another scrum team. And a third one. Finally all the people worked in a group and we started to speed up. Building time dropped to two (2) days...and someone said: why don't write scripts for building? So we did. And one tester said: why don't we write test code? So we did. OMG, we won't have time for playing table-tennis...

The blondie went back to the North. He did his work. 

Never mind. After a couple of years we had more than ten (10) thousand implemented test cases running every day in a regression system. These were not unit tests, no...these were socalled functional, high level, E2E tests. And yes, we had lots of unit tests and integration tests as well. Building took 10 minutes...with deployment and smoke tests. From one week to ten minutes...improvement? Yes. Not bad. Build monitors, continuous integration and regression, smoke tests and immediate fault detection. "You broke the build! Pay one dollar, fix it in 2 mins and that's all." And we exchanged the money for beers in a pub called Coma. Hallelujjah! (Yes, that was its name. Do you know the saying 'All roads lead to Rome '? We improved it to this: 'All roads lead to Coma'. Hehe. )

So here we are now. Tale is over. But what's next for us? Good question. After nine (9) years of Agile you have to ask yourself: what is the next step to take?