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!
