In the trenches and slowly moving ahead

I heard a rumour while I was attending Öredev in Malmö in november about a teamleader at my company. It was an inspirational rumour. The main thing was that he wanted to scipt more testing of the product he is working with!
Is this inspirational, you may ask, and I have to say YES. It should be inspirational to anyone who believes in the possibillities of an exploratory testing approach. There's a good debate in the making when someone wants to go in that direction.

We planned a meeting to talk about the impressions from the conference with a focus on testing. I went into the meeting with a guerilla attitude but no such tactics were needed. It was a good meeting. We quickly discovered that the they do exploratory testing, but in a very freestyling way and only rarely. The test lead on that team does it when completely new services and new major features are getting ready for testing and have reached a level where it can be done.

I should tell you that the product we're dealing with here does not come equipped with a UI. That part is provided to our customers by other companies. This makes testing a bit more challenging, and interesting. All ideas about testing under these circumstances are welcome. I want to learn more and I try to listen and learn from all sorts of sources.

Anyway, we didn't really arrive at any decisions about ET but we decided to keep talking about integrating it in the processes. The development team is working hard on implementing development processes that are intended to help raise the quality of their output and instead of trying to change to much at the same time testing, and test approaches, where put on hold. Have you seen this before? It's not all that bad, there is alot of positive vibes and an open mindedness for change that will lead to improvement in the delivery and development so I have hope for the future. I just got to remind them that there are ways to get better at testing to!

A blog about testing!

Last week I attended the Öredev conference in Malmö and spent the first three days learning about Rapid Software Testing from James Bach. The last to days of the conference I spent listening to a diverse group of people including Karen N. Johnson giving a talk about story telling techniques and how to use them in our context, Torbjörn Ryber, who shared some interesting experiences, Pradeep Soundararajan shared experienceses from India. There was alot happening and one of the other speakers I listened to was Mattias Göranssson, from Sony Ericsson in Lund, talking about introducing Heuristic Based Testing at SEMC. It was very interesting and since he could not share much detail and the fact that they have been at it for less than a year, it lacked a little in examples. It would be interesting to learn more about how they go about introducing exploratiry testing, since that is what he is trying to do, and what experiences that will produce. I'm looking forward to hearing more as they move forward.

The experience of the conference was over all good. The food was bland but the talks were good. Pradeep told me he had been to many conferences in India were the food was great, and that was what people came for, but the speakers were bland. I prefer it the way it was i Malmö allthough I would really like good food AND good speakers. We'll see when that happens.

James Bach did a good job in the Rapid Software Testing course. I think we all felt challenged and alot of us did our best to challenge James which did lead to some very interesting discussions and we all came out of that with new knowledge and new experiences. The two things that are reoccurring in James's course , I think, are two major themes: Focus and Defocus and most importantly Think For Yourself!
I will make a t-shirt for myself that says: I Think For Myself! That is just a small, but not insignificant, thing I will bring with me from the course and conference in Malmö last week.

I will try to share as much, and as often, as I can, my experiences in testing on this blog. I will use it to try and get reflections from other testers. I will try to use it to learn from you! Please leave a comment about anything if you come accross something you think is good, not that important to comment but appreciated, something that you think is so off the wall and so completly wrong you just have to speak up, I love a good debate and a good discussion.

Don't hesitate! Plunge in!