The Tax Man

Posted on April 18, 2014 by ramonarjona

Introduction

As I write this, Tax Day in the United States is just behind us. This is the day when individuals are required by law to settle their tax bill with the US Federal Government, and in many cases with their state governments. Filing your taxes can get complicated, and income tax preparation is a large industry in the United States, with revenue around ten billion dollars according to IBISWorld. That’s ten billion dollars spent annually, helping people cope with the hassle, the complexity, and the general all around unpleasantness of paying taxes.

In the past, software testing could feel like paying taxes and being a software tester could start to feel like working for the IRS. There are forms to fill out. There are deadlines to be met. And there’s process, process, process and at the end of the day it feels like people only notice when something goes Horribly Wrong. But there’s a way to change all that.

Do you know how to get people to appreciate and understand paying taxes? Demonstrate a clear value for their investment, be flexible, and be data-driven.

Deliver Measurable Value

How many times this week did you run a test that didn’t find a bug in the last year? Be honest.

Running tests that don’t find bugs is not, generally, a great way to deliver value. It’s tempting to confuse activity with value and it’s nice to feel busy, but can you imagine explaining how you spent your time to the CEO of your company? It would go something like this:

CEO: So, what have you done this week?

You: Well, I ran a bunch of tests.

CEO: I see. Tell me more about how that improves our product or our profitaiblity?

You: Well, most of the tests I run don’t find bugs. We just run them because we’ve always run them.

[Cricket sounds]

In a conversation with your CEO, your boss, or even your mom you should be able to clearly and distinctly describe what you did to deliver value to the organization. Imagine this conversation instead:

CEO: So, what have you done this week?

You: I prevented thousands of dollars in revenue loss.

CEO: Pray tell, how did you to this?

You: I looked at the numbers from our website and I saw that traffic was down. I talked to Larry in development and found out that we’d just changed the font on the front page, about the same time traffic dropped. I worked with him and we put together an experiment where we tested the new font with some users and the old font with some other users. Turns out users hate the new font. We reverted the change and traffic’s gone up. We’ve put a process in place to do experimentation on all our big changes now.

CEO: I see. Tell me more about your ideas.

[Applause]

Be Flexible

In the past, we kept our tests in long documents, like giant Word files or long Excel spreadsheets. Then we created specialized software to manage the test cases. We had checklists. Lots of checklists.

The funny thing was, it could be possible to hit every box on the checklist and still deliver mediocre software. It was also possible for the checklist to slow down product development, without having anything measurable to show for it. How many times have you had to reject a change because the test process couldn’t accommodate it in time for your product deadline? Again, be honest. I bet you can think of at least one great change that couldn’t make it into your product because your change management system or your test pass couldn’t move fast enough to get the change in before the deadline.

There are some software development activities that require very rigorous, very cautious change management either because of regulatory requirements or because of risk to life or property. It’s very likely that you do not work in one of those areas. Even if you do there are probably places in your process that could stand some scrutiny and some adjustment.

At the end of the day you are not shipping your checklist. Go through the stages of your process and ask yourself if they’re really adding value, or if they’re only there because they’ve always been there. Then cut everything out of the process that doesn’t deliver real, measureable value to your users or your organization.

Be Data-driven

There are tons of tools available for getting data back from your application. Amazon has published a framework for doing A\B testing and analytics, and Facebook has Airlock. There are frameworks available for .NET, JavaScript, and pretty much any other platform that you need.

But, you protest, your product is written in COBOL and distributed via floppy disk to a small group of users in Thule, Greenland and McMurdo Base, Antarctica. There’s no way to be data-driven without writing my own framework from scratch and I don’t have time for that!

To this I say: horsefeathers. Being data-driven isn’t about using a framework about a buzzword. It’s about going out and looking at the real world (which is where your users live) and trying to understand how they’re using your software and what could change to make life better for them. If you don’t have a framework for doing A\B testing or getting user data back directly from your application, consider doing user interviews or surveys. The important thing is that you look at real users doing their real work and don’t just rely on results you got from your manual or automated testing.

To a certain extent, being data driven can be like answering a Fermi question. Start with a question that you need an answer to, for example “Do my users like the new font?” Then figure out what you already know and what tools you have at your disposal that can help you learn more. Frameworks are nice and they can make information easier to gather, but they aren’t the only way for you to go into the real world and get data from real users.

Conclusion

I don’t think there’s anybody who truly enjoys paying taxes. There are, however, tons of people who enjoy testing software. If you’re one of these people, and if you want your users and your dev peers to respect your work, then deliver measurable value, be flexible and be data-driven. If you don’t want to do these things, then don’t be surprised when your collleagues greet you with about as much enthusiasm as they greet an audit from the IRS.

Filed under: Test Planning | 2 Comments »

Testing Is Like Going To The Doctor

Posted on February 3, 2014 by ramonarjona

Introduction

By now, you’ve probably heard the phrase “move quality upstream.” The idea is that we want developers to take more ownership of the validating the quality of the code they produce. There are a couple of common sense practices–most of which you’ve already heard of–that you need to adopt to start moving your org in this direction.

The first practice you need to adopt is unit testing. If your org doesn’t embrace unit testing, this is the first thing you need to go fix. Fortunately there’s been a lot written about unit testing and about how to get a dev org to adopt unit testing as a best practice. There’s even an IEEE standard on how to approach unit testing, if you’re into that kind of thing.

The next practice you need to adopt is test automation. Everything I write is going to assume that you believe test automation is generally a good thing and that you’ve got a standard test harness that you can use to exercise the code under test. Maybe you bought a test harness off the shelf. Maybe you’re using an open source test framework. Maybe you’re a special, unique snowflake and your org has a test harness that’s completely internal. Whatever. The point is, I’m going to assume that you believe in writing tests that are automated, repeatable and maintainable. I’m also going to assume you have some automated sanity tests, and probably an automated way to build and deploy code. If you haven’t got these yet, there’s some great books and blogs out there that’ll help you get the job done.

Great. What’s Next?

OK. So you’ve adopted both unit testing and automated functional testing. You’ve got an automated build and an automated BVT system that tells you when the build is just plain broken. That’s great. The next thing you need to think about is how to move more of the functional testing of software into the hands of the dev that’s writing it.

It makes sense for dev to own at least some functional testing. If you think about it, every time we move code from a developer to a tester we’re introducing overhead. It’s like having to setup and tear down a stack during a function call, or like having to move from “on box” to “on rack” in a cloud computing environment. It’s a tiny cost that repeated hundreds of times add up to a really big cost. The problem is that functional testing is a really big problem space. Are we asking dev to take on basic happy path testing? What about pairwise or stress testing? What about negative testing?

Yes. Yes, to all of it. But we’re going to do it one piece at a time. And when we’re done, we’re still going to have a ton of other stuff to do as quality assurance professionals. It’ll just be different stuff than what we do today.

The first thing you need to ask yourself is, “What is the first thing I do when dev hands me a piece of code to test?” The next thing you need to ask yourself is, “Does this really need to be done at all?” Then ask, “If this needs to be done, am I really the right person to do it?”

The first thing that you do when dev hands you a piece of code is going to be different depending on the kind of software you’re shipping. If you own a web service, you might validate that basic browsing and payment processing are working. If you own a game, you might make sure the menus load. The thing is, there’s probably something that you always do first when a dev tells you that a piece of code is done.

That thing, whatever it is–do you really need to do it? Is it finding bugs? What’s the risk to your product if you don’t find a bug at this stage? If a test doesn’t find bugs and it doesn’t mitigate risk, it’s probably not worth running. If a test always finds bugs, then we need to do something to improve quality because consistent failure is a sign that something’s systemically wrong.

Here’s a table to illustrate the point:

Always find Bugs Rarely Finds Bugs
High Risk We need more quality before we run this test Somebody should run this test
Low Risk We need more quality before we run this test Don’t run the test

Is There A Doctor In The House?

A test in software is kind of like getting a test from the doctor. If the doctor finds that my blood pressure is high, I’m the one who gets on the treadmill to try to get my blood pressure down, not the doctor. If the tests find that something’s consistently wrong, the the developer needs to do something to rectify the consistent failure: more code review, more unit testing–or maybe running the functional test themselves.

If the doctor thinks that it’s worthwhile to have my blood pressure monitored, I could come into the office to do it but that’ll get expensive and time consuming really fast. Or I could buy a blood pressure cuff and monitor my vitals myself, which will be much cheaper. The automated test that you’ve been running every time your dev hands you code? That test is your automatic, home-use blood pressure cuff.

The key here is that the home blood pressure monitor is automatic. I push a button, it squeezes my arm like an anaconda, and it spits out a reading. I don’t need a stethoscope. I don’t even need to know how to spell “systolic”. If somebody hadn’t invented this nifty little automated testing device, I wouldn’t be able to do this test by myself. But they did, and I can, and it saves a ton of time and money.

So if your test is always finding bugs or if the area is high risk, take your automated test and say to your dev partner, “Hey, I run this test every time you hand me code. If you ran it instead it would save us both some time.”

I’m assuming, of course, that your automated test runs pretty quickly, doesn’t generate false failures, and don’t require mastery of the Dark Arts to setup and execute–just like the automated blood pressure cuff. As long as you meet these conditions with your tests, the win for everybody is usually pretty obvious. It’s exactly the same as not driving to the doctor when you have a home blood pressure cuff–don’t go to the tester when you’ve got a quick, easy way of validating quality yourself.

Filed under: Test Planning, Testing Tools | 4 Comments »

%d bloggers like this: