Tales of a Tester

Learning, learning, learning! Are you the new Mozart?

“Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.” 

― Isaac Asimov

During job interviews the HR girls often ask us this question: why would you like to change your job?

Yes, more money. The first thing which pops into your mind if...you are young enough, at least from a financial point of view. If you already have enough money to pay the "costs of your life" (family, flat, car, etc), then this is not so obvious. In this case learning is the magic word. Learning something new, leaving your comfort zone, doing some unusual. 

At least for many of us.

In IT industry learning is easy and difficult at the same time. Easy, because there are so many new technologies, ideas and solutions coming up every single day that we can't even follow them. All you have to do is to make a choice, what to learn. And this makes it very difficult. It's like a long term investment. Where should I put my brain power, what's worth to learn it? I can start this one and that one, but if the stock price drops, shall I start something new?

Scientists say you need 10000 (ten thousand) hours practicing to become very professional in something. That's about 5-6 years, counting 8 hours /day, not counting weekends and holidays. Wow! Mozart started to practice music composition when he was 4. Was he a genius? Probably not. He just practiced a lot. A lot lot lot.

Do you have 10000 hours for learning e.g. test automation? No, you don't...you don't even have 2 hours a day, I bet.

Testers should learn different manual testing methods, they should learn bug tracking, different scripting or programming languages to automate their tests, continuous integration and regression (and tools), web technologies, databases, security issues, handling different mobile platforms, test management tools, other testing tools, BDD, TDD, html, http, etc, etc. 

Besides their work. 

Of course, sometimes you learn when you work. But after a time you don't. You just repeat the same things again and again. In this case there is only one solution: you need to find a new project...or an HR girl somewhere.

How much time do you have for learning on a usual day? How do you learn? What are your sources? 

Isn't the effictive learning the most important thing to learn first? 

Do you teach your children to learn? You should.

You can follow me on twitter: @GaborTWTR

Tale of a tester

Tests & trends

Once upon a time I was involved in an international testing team and we were testing a complicated web application for months. I did not move to London ( no way! ), but worked with some guys from the misty, rainy city on a daily basis. You know the stuff: daily meetings, retros, estimations, catch-ups and how-are-you talks. They had the money to visit us a couple of times in the Wild East, which is not that wild, of course and they were fantastic guys. Except their manager.

He was obsessed with the idea of automation. Nothing else matters, only automation! He wanted us to implement every ridiculous, tiny test case he ever saw on the story cards even if it had no sense at all. Testing it manually was much more effective and everyone knew this fact in the team. Still, we had to put a lot of effort to write the code, run it and maintain it under the frame of our precious continuous regression system. 

Why? 

First I thought that he simply wants us to practice the coding. I can accept that, what more, it's a very good idea! Except if the test cases are too simple and you are a senior tester with years of coding behind you. In this case this task can be boring and not too challenging which is a managerial failure. 

But it turned out that it wasn't about practicing. 

It was about trends in testing. 

Yes, you read well. He saw some articles on the Net about automation and how it would replace manual testing. And he became a believer...in a manager role. Bad times are coming...killing manual testing is like hanging on Facebook all day instead of going to meet your friends. You have to find the balance or you are done. 

But this is not about him, actually. It's about the fancy trends in testing. Are you following the trends? If you see a new tool, will you try it out and tell your teammates that this is the future? What do you need to be convinced by a new solution, new process or new tool? When do you say that you had enough and want to try out something new? 

Is the manual testing dead?

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?