Testing Debt

After spending many years in testing and following different models of delivery like Waterfall, Iterative and now the current trend Agile, I often faced challenges with maintaining testing assets and keep them up to date. Testing assets are primarily my test scripts be it manual or automation. Now the primary question is why it is difficult to maintain testing assets?

-          Focus is limited to current iteration and release

-          Smaller release cycles hence less time to write comprehensive tests

-          Very Less time to focus on new integrations in the application, I will discuss more in detail in the section below

-          Regression suite often left not updated

Let’s take a typical example of iteration, in first iteration I write test scripts for all the stories and tested them completely, in second iteration there are integrations with stories that I tested in the first iteration but my focus of testing is the current iteration stories. In each iteration there are new features developed and I am bound to check new features as well old integrations but the timelines does not allow me to do that and I remain focused on current iteration items. I want to focus on integration testing but due to tight timelines I often put them on the back burner. And this eventually piles up my integration testing. Ideally high level scenarios related to integration of modules should be covered in each new iteration.

On the similar lines I should update my regression suite after each iteration, add test scripts and remove obsolete scripts but again this is something which never comes on priority due to tight schedules in Agile environment. This ultimately increases my “testing debt”, whether integration testing debt, regression testing debt, automation testing debt or any kind of testing I can think of. As stated in wiki debt is an obligation owed by one party (the debtor) to a second party. As a tester I am knowingly, unknowingly increasing my testing debt and my obligation towards quality delivery is increasing, so the foremost question comes to my mind is how to keep my debt in control and finally be debt free.

I have few thoughts that I feel will help me in working on my debt along with current testing obligations like

-          identify high priority test scripts from earlier iterations

-          prioritize identified scripts on the basis of risk associated

-          involve early in testing, I would say sit with developers and confirm what code changes they are doing, and what impact it may bring to existing features

-          start working on testing as soon as you get an idea of what needs to be done, identify test scenarios, write test scripts, create test data, build your test environment

And the most important is to work with your management and explain them about the debt and your plan to overcome from this, get an approval to work on testing debt along with your present testing activities.

I sometimes feel it is very difficult to always deliver ‘Quality’ in Agile and the definition of quality should be changed to keep up with the pace of delivery. When things change we also require to change the processes. It is not an ideal situation for a tester to keep following the same processes in changing times. Thoughts?

Meeting Phil the 'Tester'

My journey to USA started on the day I joined master’s program in computer applications. Each day in college comes with a new learning and many stories of passed batch mates who made it big in the field of IT, traveled across the world especially USA do rounds in the college. I was always interested to know more about people who have traveled to USA, I don’t know why but this is the kind liking to the country I have seen or heard in news only. It took me time to realize the real reason behind this liking and that happened in the year of 2010 when I landed on the New York Airport. This was my first trip to USA and I was anxious and at the same time excited that I have reached the country where I always wanted to be.

It was a long 8hrs wait in New York for my next flight to Austin…yes Austin, Texas…cowboy state. I was planned to meet ‘Phil McNeely’ there who is supposed to train me on product Vacationrentals. I had no idea about him except I had talked to him couple of times over phone…his voice was heavy over the phone.

On the cold Monday morning of January I reached office by walking around 2 miles (care taker of the property where I stayed suggested that office is in walk-able distance), I was frozen and was cursing myself for not calling a cab, finally I reached office and I was excited as I am going to meet Phil. After sometime there was a huge guy entered in my room and introduced himself as Phil and in the first few minutes of interaction I knew that I am going to have a good time in Austin learning Vacationrentals. Next thing we do is we chalk out a plan on how we are going to spend time in learning, explaining things about the product and services used.

I spent 5 weeks in Austin and it was a memorable time for me, Phil and I used to discuss lot of things about the product, how he has achieved success in testing this product, what are the tough areas, and his perspective about testing. We had lot of healthy discussions where we discuss test strategies, test planning, testing particular requirement, most of the times we agree with each other opinion. Phil is very good in explaining things; he used to draw diagrams to explain the problems and even come up with an incident that happened in real life and relate those incidents with testing. One of the most impressive things about him is that he is very clear about the thing he wants in testing and that leaves no scope of assumptions or mismanagement.

Interaction with Phil is enriching experience, I learned a lot from him about testing, time management, handle pressure and dealing with not so friendly situations that I had not learned in my many years of experience in IT industry. All I can say is thanks to Phil for his support and guidance.

Why is ‘Why’ important

As a tester I always have lot of questions to ask to developers, fellow testers, management and myself about the product, bugs, problems, functionality and future. I sometimes think how important is to ask questions, how they will help me, help my product. I got numerous answers for all my questions and when evaluating the answers I came up with one reasonable answer i.e. questions help me understand and evaluate myself better.

Recently I find myself among questions, lot of questions, most of them are How, When, What should I...and very few Why do I type of questions. I found that all questions can be reasonably answered but it is always difficult to answer Why questions. Whenever I ask myself ‘Why should this…’, ‘Why I am here…’ type of questions I find myself in real trouble in answering these questions as these questions comes with lot of answers pregnant with possibilities and to pick the correct one out of them is a huge task.

Few years back while working for an organization ‘Why am I here…’ question comes to my mind one day and on evaluating and picking the best answer I found myself changing a job. It is real difficult period for me to decide a job change because I am settled there with a routine job, working to the best of my capabilities and the management is happy with me but when I asked myself this question I found many reasonable answers like I am doing a routine job where nothing much new to learn, no new challenges etc and on evaluating the answers I found that to grow in life, career and to learn new things I have to move on and that is what I did.

From that point onwards I keep asking me these ‘Why’ questions on a regular basis to keep evaluating myself and to keep myself on toes…

Positives from negative testing in our daily life

(For me) Testing is the way of satisfying my needs of breaking, finding faults in others works (means their understanding does not match with of the customer or people who are supposed to use the software), lack of quality…and to ensure that quality remain intact with the software I use many types of testing and one of them is “Negative testing”.

Hmmm... many people will think why Negative testing, a simple answer would be Negative testing is nothing but an ‘Art of creative destruction’ where I try to destruct the software in a creative way (I mean to say that whatever I do is creative…hehehe)…another question crawls in mind how destruction could be creative? In software and especially in testing whatever problems I find in the software whether it is a simple spelling mistake or a complicated server crash it always help the developer to understand the hidden problems that may spoil the image of the organization in front of the customers, users and indirectly if affects the business.

When I focus on negative testing I always think of the user who don’t know about the application and how badly or in a wrong manner s/he can use the application that may break the application, lets take a simple example where user enter alphabets in date field and then submit the data, if the application has not gone through such kind of testing or if there are no such validations on UI then I am sure that this simple (wrong) data entry can crash the application.

As a quality assurance and software tester I sometimes think what will be the impact of my work on me when I am with my family, when I do shopping, when I am talking, when I meet my friends, when I am getting information from someone, when I am listening…overall I am trying to see the impact of my work on my day to day life. I try to list down few points that I observed over the years:

1. Shopping:- At the time of shopping my negative mind always help me to choose the right product like I always check the expiry date, manufacturer details (a big ‘NO’ to China made ), contents of the product, guarantee, warranty etc. Some time back when I am buying a DVD player, the shop owner try to convince me with some very good offers on the Chinese stuff on which they are not giving any guarantee but at the same time giving me a very good price. My negative mind intercepts and stops me from buying a Chinese made DVD player. However I had to spend a few bucks more at that time to buy a good quality product but I am satisfied with my decision.

2. Gathering information/ listening from known or unknown person:- negative mind helps me to listen and gather information that is actually relevant to me. When I am talking to someone and try to retrieve some information from him/her, at that time I am doing critical listening ”I am trying to evaluate the message by logic of argument, strength of evidence, implications, intentions and motives”. This way I will evaluate the message and assure that whatever information I am getting will be useful to me, will not harm me if not help me.

I observed that negative thoughts in mind really help me in evaluating the things, situations, people….above all I can say that it improves my judgment over a period of time.

Value of bad days

Sometimes I thought that if I was given a power to rewrite my life where I can remove some of the days that was not good, a day that come with really bad experiences, a day when I met with an accident, a day when I had a quarrel with a friend, a bad day at work… I will definitely remove them but at the same time if I give a thought and think about those days then I understand one thing that every day whether it is good or bad, it teaches me something, then why I want to remove those days?

Hmmm…I am puzzled and don’t know what to do with the power, should I go ahead and remove the bad days from my life or should I try to recollect the lessons learned from those days and keep those days intact so they keep me reminding the value of bad days.

Finally I made it clear to my mind that I should not try to rewrite/remove those bad days as they have helped me to reach a point in life where I am, I am here because I learned from my mistakes, I am here because I tried to retrieve something good from a bad day, I am here because…

Today is another bad day because a dear friend of mine is leaving but I will never remove this day from my life because today again I have learned something from it…

In this short span of life I learned one thing that life is a combination of good and bad days as well as some imaginary days…still learning the Value of Bad days…

Throw it back

Responsibility and assistance are the words that have something in common and that something is ‘providing help’. There is a thin difference between responsibility and assistance and we must know that difference to be successful in life.

Now the question comes how one can be successful if one knows the difference between these two? Before going any further and explain you about becoming successful, I must tell you why we became unsuccessful if we don’t know the difference between ‘Responsibility’ and ‘Assistance’?

Responsibility means we are shouldering help to someone who is not able to complete his work, task, assignments and need our help to manage/complete his tasks. Here we need to think that why he is not able to complete his task, because he don’t know about it or because he don’t have an idea how to start with it or because he is incapable of doing a task or because it is in his nature to take help from someone else and share his responsibility with others or may be any other reason.

If the reason behind sharing Responsibility is that “it is in person nature” then we need to take care of ourselves from such people. Why? comes instantly in our mind, because once we start sharing his responsibilities we are responsible for the success as well as failure of his work, we start looking at his work as our responsibility, we take care of his work as it is our work and in sometime we bogged down with his task, his responsibilities and then we start doubting ourselves that if something goes wrong then we are held responsible for it although it is not our task/work and we are not responsible for the outcome of his work, we are there to help him to overcome his problems still we have a guilt feeling that his task does not provide desired results.

At the same time we forget our desires, our path to success, what we want to achieve in our life because we are under stress to see that other person can complete his task, fulfill his responsibilities but on the other hand the other person does not think about us, and on the basis of our help, our shared responsibilities he start achieving success in life and we remain where we are, our growth path freeze and we don’t have any idea about our personal and professional life.

If the reason is that the person don’t know about the task and he is incapable of doing a task then in that case the help we are providing is a kind of assistance, our assistance to a person will make a person to complete his task but we are not sharing his responsibility, we are not responsible for the success or failure of his task. Our work finishes, once we are done with our help.

Once we know and understand that sharing responsibilities can be harmful at sometimes then we should also learn to avoid such situations. The best way to avoid such situations in life to not to share responsibilities of a person (I am not saying that you do not provide assistance), once something is thrown to you, you should throw it back and tell the person that you are not here to share his responsibilities and you don’t want to be responsible for his work, his responsibilities, although you are always there to provide assistance. Once you start throwing back the responsibilities, you should be able to concentrate on your work, your desires, you are on your path to success and you will be able to achieve whatever you want in life.

So, friends do remember “Throw it back”.