The dark art of testing in agile

***I am now back at Software Education teaching and consulting around testing and agile . I’ve just recently rewritten our Agile Testing course (ICAgile accredited) and this is my blurb on the course before I teach it on the 7th October for the first time (see http://www.SoftEd.com). Also I haven’t written anything here in a long time and being prompted by something else I sent to Lee Hawkins, I thought I would post this here as well***

Testing is like the dark arts. It hides in the shadows of projects probing silently, mocked openly and looked down with disdain by those who think they know better. But do they?

Testing was seen like this even by testing consultancies as they espoused the rhetoric that testing is simplistic, mechanical and artifact driven. The implied idea was that ‘any one can do testing’ was prominent. Fortunately two communities began to challenged these ideas. The context driven community broke the fallacies of mechanical, simplistic testing to human based, skill based, thought provoking investigations of self, product and relationships. The second community was the agile community who helped challenge the ideas of heavyweight documentation and adherence to process to one of experimentation with short feedback loops. With this came a more technical approach to testing using tools to assist (though sometimes there is an overreliance on these tools).

Our agile testing course looks to combine these two communities together by building key skills around critical thinking, using heuristics to build solid testing models and focusing on quicker feedback and leaner documentation. In turn, building these key skills then help testers to be better equipped to understand the agile context. Testing in an agile context requires quick, critical, skilled thinking and combined with some technical understanding enables testers to answer this question – How do I add value to my team today?

Our agile testing course is very hands on and experiential and looks to increase testing skills that help you become better in your role and add value. Testing is no longer in the shadows – it is front and centre and is our mission to help you to become indispensable to your team.

The question for you though is – how much better do you want to be as a tester?

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Good Exploratory Testing Practices webinar

Today (14th February 2011 @ 12oo hours – 12pm – New Zealand time) I will be presenting a webinar on Exploratory Testing practises that I use to help put guidiance around my testing.

To register for the webinar click here.

Also check here to see how New Zealand time compares with the time in your part of the world.

Look forward to having you tune in!

STANZ 2009 Wellington New Zealand

STANZ (Software Testing Australia New Zealand) is the premier Software Testing conference this side of the equator! The conference kick off in Wellington New Zealand with Lee Copeland , James Bach, Karen N Johnson, Julian Harty and Brian Bryson forming the international cast of speakers along with a  host of talented local speakers.

Monday started with a keynote from Lee Copeland from which in outlined the innovations he sees coming. I found him warm, engaging and very humble.

James Bach was next and what impressed me the most was the way he *prowled* the side of the conference room before being introduced and then ran and jumped on stage! I was wondering a whole bunch of “what if’s” then! His talk Becoming a Software Testing Expert was vintage James Bach in which he discussed the plays of Euripides and other Greek tragedians and related them back to software testing. The point from my perspective is that testing is neither purely technical or engineering but that we can learn from all multple areas and disciplines (history, philosophy, pyschology etc). James also discussed his Huh-Really-So heuristic which he uses when someone makes a claim about something. Huh means i don’t understand, please explain what you mean. Really is what other approaches are there, what else could happen, what other tools could we use and So is to dismantle the argument or to determine whether or not the idea is worth pursuing (I hope i got this right! :))

Unfortunately i didn’t get to speak to either Lee or James one on one but i did manage to talk to Karen N Johnson and Julian Harty. Karen’s workshop on test pairing was very interesting but more so the discussion we had (myself, Karen and Sharon Robson) after. Karen also gave a wonderful keynote on story telling which i think as testers, is an area on which we can improved. We may test but how do we say what we see? How do we know who to talk to and how to talk to them?

The last highlight for me from a presentation point of view was Julian Harty’s presentation on security testing which i found extremely interesting. I came away from the talk with the ideas of :-

*Finding a mentor

*Use tools

*Threat modelling

*and continuous learning (including self study or self learning).

I managed to talk to Julian afterwards and what surprised me was that security testing is about 1% of what he does as a tester. However when he did do security testing, he taught himself/found ways to make himself knowledgeable and very effective.

STANZ was a blast! Great speakers, great conference and more importantly great people. I managed to catch up with a host of new/old friends and its was awesome to share STANZ with them!

SDC 2010 – BUSINESS ANALYSIS GETS AGILE!

Following on a from two very successful conferences SDC and STANZ 2009 (in both Wellington and Sydney), SDC 2010 has been annouced with the theme – Business Analysis gets agile. This will no doubt be a fantastic conference! Start planning to attend now!

See SDC 2010 for more details!