What Impressed Me at Oredev
Fredrik Scheja did a wonderful talk about testing against requirements. I’m so glad he avoided the common tropes about the importance of “testable” requirements (he offered “Scheja’s Law” which is “any requirement that can be implemented can also be tested”). I also happen to know he’s a gifted leader of exploratory testers. He works through Sogeti for a client I cannot name– apparently because that client does not want to publicly admit they do ET. Oh when will they learn?
I met and conversed briefly with Rikard Edgren with whom I had tangled online. I was pretty upset with him after the email stuff, but in person I was pleasantly surprised. I will go back and reevaluate, because he has a look in his eye I love to see; clever and a bit cynical; ready for an argument. Keith Stobie has perfected that look, and gives me no end of fun trouble. Rikard did a talk about testing creativity, though I didn’t see it. (I generally don’t attend talks when I haven’t been invited, because otherwise the speakers get upset when I start asking questions.)
One fellow who invited me to hear him was Mattias Göransson. He did a strange presentation. Many of his slides came from Michael Bolton, who, it turns out, got them from me. So Mattias was unknowingly explaining my own material to me. Interesting. Mattias presented exploratory testing, but called it “heuristic testing” for cultural reasons at his company. He spoke of heuristics, but was unable to share any specific heuristic due– again– to his squeamish company not wanting anyone to know what he does. But despite the constraints he was under, it clear that he’s definitely doing something interesting. He’s not just waving his hands. I’d like to see his next talk.
It was cool how Pradeep Soundararajan put so much humor into his talk against best practices. I haven’t seen many entertaining Indian speakers, but he’s one of them. He also said “I followed James Bach’s advice and got fired for it.” (Which although not a joke is one of the more surprising things I’ve heard from Pradeep, considering that he represents Satisfice in India.)
Oh, and let me not forget Tobbe Ryber. He did a talk on context-driven test design. I saw part of Tobbe’s presentation before being called away. Tobbe has written a good book on test design, and now it’s out in English. He also took me to dinner and introduced me to a magician who showed me how to make a card vanish. I’ve been practicing for several days! He said next time he would show me how to make the card come back.
At least half the testing speakers at Oredev were Context-Driven folks or sympathetic to CDT. So, I’m pleased. We’re taking over the world with our gospel of “It’s okay to solve problems instead of following gospel.”
I have been all around Sweden in the past few weeks. It’s clear that there is a lot of interest in Rapid Testing and the whole exploratory approach. No wonder, with the economy tanking… bring on real testers and let the script-heavy factory approach to testing die its natural and long-deserved death.
(Note to Robert Martin: pi goes like this: 3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971 THEN 6)
November 24th, 2008 at 8:49 am
It was interesting to spend the week at Öredev and I agree with you that Mattias Göranssons talk was strange but interesting. Since I currently spend some time every week at his company I’ll try to get in a lunch with Mattias and try to learn more! I do believe there is a lot of stuff, that he didn’t/couldn’t talk about, that would be real interesting to learn more about. When I spoke to him after his talk I got the impression that he wants his tester to learn, rather than be taught. I find that reassuring, it will help him in his mission.
Oh, and you were quite good also, James! I did enjoy the course and I learned from it, and will continue to do so as I revisit my notes and challenge you as well as everything else I encounter!
November 24th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
“I followed James Bach’s advice and got fired for it.” (Which although not a joke is one of the more surprising things I’ve heard from Pradeep, considering that he represents Satisfice in India.).
Well, let me share the rest of the story for your readers. I was working in one of the organization that believes Sick (6) Sigma is the way to go about testing. I was asked by my manager to achieve 95% test cases pass in order for our product to meet Six Sigma standards that the entire organization is rated.
Undergoing your training lead me to use the skills I was learning to experiment at work that lead me to find a lot of bugs. I was neither able to associate those bugs with the existing test case document nor they allowed me to add test cases ( because it makes their next cycle complex )
Also, I realized I could use the test idea from a test case run it in an exploratory way by varying some parameters, I found some bugs but those bugs were not accepted because when other testers tried reproducing them using those test cases ( the way they were written ) they couldn’t find it. I had to share my idea of tweaking the test idea to find those bugs.
The estimation of number of test cases that can be run by a tester per month was based on — a tester merely running those tests without finding bugs, reporting them, investigating them and supporting them when a developer needs help.
The more bugs I found, the more other tasks I had to do because again their 6 Sigma process mandated that a bug reported to the bug tracking system has to be supported when developers chose to fix.
Not realizing all this a test manager whom I was reporting to decided to fire me for:
a) For delaying the release by finding bugs
b) Not following the process ( passing 95% of the test cases assigned to me )
c) For not listening to what he said.
Your readers might also be interested to know that I feared to let you know this information because I feared you might not want to coach me further.
I struggled without job, without money for about 6 months till I convinced a friend of mine who in turn convinced his manager to take me by letting them know in advance that I had been fired.
About an year from being fired and being employed in another organization, I took the confidence to let James know that I was fired. I wanted to be more truthful to him and that was the only reason why I chose to share that information with him. I was aware of the risk that he might not consider coaching me further but I was in for a surprise. He appreciated me for getting myself fired from a manager who didn’t value the value. He considered me to be good enough to coach further.
Today I am Satisfice India.
[James’ Reply: Nice story, Pradeep. It’s popular to use the pass rate of test cases to create a fake sense of test progress. I’m glad you refuse to do that.]
November 30th, 2008 at 5:14 am
to Pradeep:
It would’ve been nice if one could say this is an isolated incident, unfortunately it is not!
I know a VERRY big project where manager changed (asked testers to change) the status of the tests to something like “unrelated”, just to increase his Pass/Fail ratio. Tons of failed test hidden behind a ambiguous status – not something I’d like to work on.
December 12th, 2008 at 4:41 pm
A little off topic but on the topic of card/magic tricks, have a look at this video on TED….
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/lennart_green_does_close_up_card_magic.html
His presentation and the tricks are great! Although it is obvious that he uses trick there’s no way that you can guess/see what he’s doing.