Ask Me Anything: Testability

[heather_reid]

Ash referenced the 10 Ps of Testability from @robertmeaney

Please explain testability to me

So for me Testability in practical terms means how easy something is to test. When there is a lack of testability it slows down feedback, it reduces the quality and dept of our testing efforts, it increases cost, destroys motivation and morale and ultimately results in poor quality. Conversely focusing on Testability can unleash your development team, to do their best work, allowing them focus on the work that matters and facilitates: Faster Development. Earlier testing Broader & deeper test…

The unanswered questions:

1. How to approach testing cloud technologies?
   1.1 Somewhat related: I’d like to hear your comment on any special considerations for testability in microservices?
2. What are some ways to bring awareness of testability to a team? i.e are there any workshops you could recommend?
3. Can you have testability without observability or vise versa?
4. What’s your good or bad experience about testability? What are they? How they affected overall quality of the product/system/solution? What can we do to improve and influence this to be better?
5. Would you say testability is a highly subjective term? What might be highly testable to one person might not be to another?
6. How would you approach the business to convince them they need to focus on testability from the start of a project?
7. Testability seems really cool important to you. Was there particular projects/experiences that lead you to focusing on testability.
8. What was first, the tester or the testability?
9. Is the following scenario effectively untestable: Say, you need to test page 5 in a sign-up process without effectively testing pages 1-4 each time you want to test page 5? (Let’s assume page 1 is tested). There are dependencies and API dependent responses required on each previous page. Does that mean that pages 2-5 are effectively untestable?
10. In a high functioning development team automated testing is often viewed as not required or “secondary”, how do you overcome this bias?
11. What does ensure testability?
12. How do you respond to “testability is the tester’s problem”? Especially combined with a reluctance to insert test-hooks to a product because “It’s not the product, and we don’t want to have test-only features that will increase our overhead”.
13. Can you give examples of how you could improve the testability with the architecture?
14. How does traceability relate to the testability of a system?
15. Who is the most handsome, charasmatic tester you have written a book with?
16. In agile world generally, we should reduce dependencies and each released piece of work (story) ot be independent, tastable and of value …
17. What do you recommend for those stories that do have dependencies, and can bring some value to customer wupon released yet the true value is when all of the related pieces of the MVP of that given feature are released? Should we take a more waterfall approach in such cases, to respect the main dependencies and to avoid customer dissatisfaction with what could come across as buggy initial releases (i.e., until the rest of the MVP pieces are released)?
18. A bit off-topic - how do you know what journeys/features to automate?
19. What steps do you take to align expectations on what all the “-ilities” you’re talking about, are?
20. How would you prioritize Testibility?
21. What would be the best team setup which enforces testability during development?