Tonight we had one of my idols in testing, @lisa.crispin, for an Ask Me Anything about Whole Team Testing.
It was clear from the number of questions we had before starting the session that we wouldnât get to them all! If we didnât get to your question or youâre catching up on the Dojo and have thought of questions youâd like to ask Lisa, please share them here 
mentioned in the chat:
The developers I work with already do some testing, particularly when the testers workload is too high. We always say that the developer should not test anything that they themselves have worked on. Do you agree with this? Is there any other situation where the developer should NOT be testing?
Do you think there is a risk that quality could decline if non-testers do the testing? Is there anything we can do to mitigate these risks when we adopt a whole team approach to testing?
Do you think there is a minimum percentage of testing that should be done by testers?
And now for the unanswered questions, seriously people I think this is the record for most amount of questions asked!
Laura asked a question about how to get the whole team involved in performance testing.
A technique that worked well for my team recently was this:
I hope that helps! Iâd be interested to hear more about your situation and would be happy to talk in more detail.
I do think that is good practice for the developers to not test their own code. Itâs hard to distance yourself from your pretty baby. That said, Iâve seen developers who are pairing and using a small exploratory testing checklist for guidance do a good job of basic testing on their own story. Just as they use unit tests and TDD to ensure code correctness, they can use some manual exploratory testing for this too. Someone else should then test it at the feature level.
That sounds like a really solid process! Have you blogged or written an article about this? Iâd love to share it.
oh wow, thatâs a lot. Iâll try to work my way through though! Everyone please feel free to chip i!
Thank you! It was my first time doing performance testing so it was only when I saw the question this evening that I realised I did have something specific that I could share from the experience - so thereâs no blog post or article yet. But the positive feedback is definitely great encouragement for me to make it happen
Unfortunately, most non-testers have a sketchy understanding of testing, at best. I think we should try to help them learn about it. Especially execs and managers need to understand the value of testing, and how an investment of quality pays off in the long run. Everyone goes around saying they want the best quality, itâs like mom and apple pie, but if they arenât willing to let teams have time to integrate testing activities into coding activities (both are equally important parts of software development), that lip service doesnât help.
Work to make benefits of testing your own team is doing more visible. Also make the problems caused by lack of testing visible. This can be as simple as highlighting critical bugs in production. Testing isnât the way to fix those - building quality in is. Testers can help the team learn ways to shorten feedback loops and develop high quality code from the start.
One way to help execs understand might be to show the opportunity cost of things like time spent triaging and fixing bugs in production (and communicating with the irate customers) at the expense of time to build new features. And, we donât get a lot of chances to show customers the value our product offers, if we blow that chance because we deliver the wrong things or deliver buggy things, itâs bad news for the business.
Whole team testing includes all testing activities, and it especially includes baking quality into the product from the get-go. I didnât get into this during the AMA, but testers can play a vital role in helping the deliver team and business stake holders achieve shared understanding of the purpose of each new feature, how it should behave, how we will know it is successful in production. We can add value with lots of different testing activities for various quality attributes: accessibility, security, reliability, usability, those ilities go on and on. We invest in regression test automation to free up time for value-add activities like exploratory testing.
If Iâm understanding this correctly - Iâve seen a lot of âagile transitionsâ where developers got training in technical practices like TDD, product people got ScrumMaster or product owner training, and testers got⌠ignored. Itâs natural for them to have a lot of fear about suddenly being stuck on a cross-functional Scrum team thatâs supposed to take responsibility for quality and testing. This is where we need managers to step in and support testers in many ways: training, time to learn, and making sure they are equally valued members of the delivery team.
Very very true.
I was recently in a software testing job interview where manual testing was pretty much seen by a senior manager as a commodity. Automated testing was more respected, but Iâm not sure exactly why they should automatically make that distinction because in my experience if automation is badly done, then itâs arguably worse than commoditized manual testing as youâre going to rely on automation and if it is like a wonky crutch, some day it may give out and youâll come crashing down.
On some level it was like the organization saw pure manual testing as a cost, but automated testing as more of a value. Obviously there are subtleties to the manual v automated debate, but as it was in a job interview it wasnât time to broach them, so I suggested quality assistance, i.e. somewhat of a flavour of whole-team testing, as something that might give a halfway house.
They seemed willing to consider this as to them it meant people with a manual skillset could add value in helping ensure automated testing created by non-testers was up to the mark, while possibly upskilling themselves to be able to work on automated testing at some future point.
To relate to your quote, with a little persuading they could possibly come to see how investing in testers and seeing the discipline in value-adding way could help them move the business forward as they were in the ironic position of having low confidence in the software they were producing but due to how they saw manual testing and testing in general, they couldnât really see an outâŚ
I havenât run into this a lot in my career. In my younger days I expect Iâd have locked horns with them! I hope today I would be smart enough to listen to them and see what they have to say. Maybe they have some good ideas. Maybe, as they talk, they will realize they have some areas they arenât so sure about. You may find an opportunity to suggest trying some small experiment. You will always meet resistance. Sometimes we can use that energy and turn it around for good.
Back in 2000, I tried to get Brian Marick to write a book on testing in Extreme Programming with me, but at the time, he didnât have experience working on an XP team. He did encourage me to go forward with the book, and I ended up writing it with Tip House. Soon, Brian introduced me to Janet. She was working as a tester on an extreme programming team in Calgary. She had the good fortune to work with some Thoughtworkers who were among the pioneers of XP. Janet became the âtesterâ for our book. Weâd send her our chapters, she would try the techniques with her team and give us feedback as to how they worked. It was a huge help to us!
After finishing the book, Janet and I kept corresponding and helping each other as being a tester on an XP team was still a rare thing. We both attended XP 2002 in Chicago. I canât remember if we first decided to collaborate on a talk, or if we first decided to collaborate on writing an article, but before long we were doing both together pretty frequently. In 2008, my editor asked if I would write a new book about testing in agile. Tip didnât want to write another book. Luckily for me, I was able to talk Janet into it! We complement each othersâ experience and skill sets really well. Now weâve started the Agile Testing Fellowship, weâre still doing tutorials together, and who knows what will be next!
This is a great question. Iâve experienced benefits both ways. When I was part of the cross-functional development team reporting to the development manager, I truly felt like part of the team. I was fortunate to have managers who valued testers as much as other team members and I was seen as a senior team member and part of the leadership.
In another job, I was part of the testing and support team, reporting to a test/support director. Helping with support was a big benefit, it helped me know what problems customers experienced and helped us improve our testing and focus it in the right places. Reporting to a director who had equal rank and authority to the development director was also an advantage there. The company culture did not value testers, though the development management grudgingly agreed they were necessary. Our director made sure that we were equally supported and valued. We were embedded in the development team and worked as part of that team. Because we were so few testers compared to the size of the team, developers did a great deal of testing work. It ended up being a great collaboration. We all learned from each other and our product was better for that.
In large companies with many delivery teams, Iâve seen the need to have, at the very least, a testing Community of Practice leader who ensures that testers get together to share experiences, knowledge, tools and such regularly, and makes sure they get all the training and support they need.
Question: My devs are amazing when we ask them to help out with automated testing but itâs much harder to get them to help out with manual testing. They say theyâre ânot good at itâ. Whatâs a good response beyond âno one is, at first, and i really need your helpâ?
As I mentioned in the AMA, it is important to share the pain of manual regression testing with everyone on the team. Divide those checklists or scripts up among everyone including developers.
For other types of manual testing, I think a lot of this is just a bit of fear from developers that they donât know how. Thatâs why I did the fun exploratory testing workshop I described, using personas and charters but testing kidsâ toys and games. Then followed up with more serious workshops testing our app.
Having testers pair with developers frequently also helps developers learn more testing skills. Even if you pair on writing production code, youâll be writing unit tests and hopefully automating tests at other levels too, so as a tester you can explain how to specify good test cases.
Once when pairing with a dev on my team we had the idea to put together a short âexploratory testing checklist for devsâ. We pinned it to our Slack channel. It encouraged developers to remember to try more manual testing before declaring a story done. I also laminated Elisabeth Hendricksonâs Testing Heuristics Cheat Sheet and left copies around the work area. I would see it get used occasionally.
Q: Does Extreme Programming still have a place in software development or has it been taken over by newer methods?
XPâs creators never intended for a thing called âExtreme Programmingâ to be around for years and years. I had a conversation with Kent Beck back in 2001 at a testing conference where I asked why they had picked such a terrible name. He said âOh, in 10 years people will just be calling this good software developmentâ. Sadly, that hasnât really happened. But many of the XP practices, such as TDD, CI, refactoring, and indeed testing, are established development practices today. We see different frameworks for managing projects, such as kanban versus Scrum, but high-performing teams are doing most if not all of the XP practices.
In some contexts, unit tests could be enough! My approach has been to get everyone on the team together, talk about what is going well and whatâs not going so well, is our code the level of quality to which we committed? What is our biggest problem? What is a realistic, timely, measurable goal to make that problem smaller? Letâs think of an experiment and measure progress towards that goal.
This is one area where I find models like the test automation pyramid helpful. Unit tests are the solid base of the pyramid. We can look at that model and talk about where we ware now and where we want ot be. I would venture to say that teams doing test-driven development with good coverage at the unit level will have code that is significantly higher quality than teams doing no test automation and probably higher quality than teams who are doing some automation through the UI level. That doesnât mean itâs good enough. We should always be trying to improve.
Since Iâm not a coder anymore and I donât write unit tests, Iâve found it doesnât really work to evangelize about how great it would be to automate tests at all the levels. Look for ways to get the whole team to talk about it. As I mentioned in the AMA, get More Fearless Change by Linda Rising and Mary Lynn Manns and go work at being an agent for change.