Intro - Exercise 1: Are your own Testing practices Traditional, Agile or Modern?

Time: 5 Minutes

Purpose: Compare and contrast traditional, agile and modern testing.

Introduction: In this lesson, we discuss the similarities and differences between traditional testing, agile testing and modern testing. Now, think about your own testing activities and where they fit in; are they more traditional, agile or modern?

Activity:

  1. Are your own testing activities more traditional, agile or modern?

Feel free to share and discuss your answers and reasoning here.

Our activities apply to a more modern testing approach. While we still have a test specialist on our teams, but there are times where we have our developers and product owners perform testing activities for features that are near ready for release. We use Accelerate metrics to gauge our performance in our team and look for improvements to improve our ability to release features to production with monitoring . We use our data analytics tools to provide us with information in terms of where to perform our testing (which devices, browsers, etc) as well as look at where we may have customer fallout for our website pages. We communicate daily as a team to collaborate on our work as well as perform workshops around bugs when they are found to help prioritize fixes (if needed) as well as measure impact to our customers. We have some automation around our core features that we want to make sure continue to work with each build (small build verification suite). We release multiple times a day and work from branches from each developer and do a code review and any additional testing that needs to be done before releasing to production . Overall, I think our activities gravitate towards a more modern testing approach, but we also need to work some more on coaching our developers to do more testing as they work on more features so that issues are found earlier in the process.

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Huge shout-out for Accelerate metrics (for those not in the know, Accelerate, but Forsgren et al. discovered that deployment frequency, lead time for changes, mean-time to resolve, and change failure rate are all high indicators of team performance and product quality).

Although not stated in the course, Iā€™m thinking more and more that there is a significant relationship between MT and a culture of devops.

Curious what others have to say about it, but thanks for being the first to post.

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I am what our company calls a Test Strategist and I would say what I do is a cross between Agile and Modern testing. The Modern testing principles resonate with me and what I do. I do test but its not all I do and I am the only one on my team with the word test in my role, everyone on my team tests. I may be the one that starts the conversation of risks and how we are going to test new work but everyone contributes.
Its interesting thinking back to how we came to this gradually over time. It wasnā€™t a planned change but a gradual process of continually trying to improve.

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This is really cool to hear. More and more Iā€™m hearing stories of people and teams already doing things like weā€™ve described with Modern Testing and then discovering the principles and the other ideas later.

I like the title of Test Strategist - I think that sums up a lot of what people who would typically drive MT Principles do.

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Iā€™ve only just bought my Pro Dojo account (I know, shame on me!) so Iā€™ve just seen this post.

I currently work as a developer for a DevOps consultancy and (most of) the MT principles are as relevant to me now as they were 2 years ago when I worked as a dedicated automation engineer.

MT principles come from Lean foundations, as you state in the podcast. But then so do Agile and DevOps. So itā€™s not a surprise that the MT principles a) can thrive in a DevOps environment and/or b) can be used to foster more of an Agile/DevOps culture.

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Hej, new to the Dojo/Pro content and stumble across the Introduction to Modern Testing course by listening to the podcast. When hearing the three definitions of testing activities, I instantly recognized ā€œagileā€ as from where I am coming. Though I believe it is slowly changing for me. When I was the only ā€œQA guyā€ in our company, I did not do anything besides testing the feature/bug tickets that developers moved to the glorious testing column of a Scrum board in Jira. Once Iā€™ve got a small team around me, I could start to gradually pull out of this rather enclosed role - one of my team members is doing that work now. So it is definitely not like this activity disappeared in the company - and try to build bridges to ā€œpeople doing other activitiesā€ with the goal to further connect our work. Conversations with especially our developer leads have been quite fruitful. Honestly, I am kind of excited about how our small QA team will look like and do in a year.

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for me and my company it ranges mainly between traditional (legacy systems) and agile (web teams). Iā€™m lucky enough to be involved in one of the agile teams but leadership are definitely pushing us to be more ā€˜modernā€™ with our testing. I personally think over time the company with evolve into the traditional teams become more agile and the agile teams become more modern. Currently my opinion of the modern testing approach is kind of like being one of the leadership team, not directly testing again but being involved in improving process/conversations etc which will overall improve the quality.

Iā€™d have to say we are more Agile than we are Modern, though we have advocates for the Modern approach. I think we are slowly transitioning to the Modern position - but that we also have people in other areas of our organisation still in the ā€œTraditionalā€ mindset which pulls us backwards and potentially slows that transition down somewhat. I think there is a genuine desire from all parties to bring everyone along on this journey, the mindset that (to quote The Boss) ā€œNobody wins unless everybody winsā€, and the bigger and more diverse the approaches within the org, the tougher that transition seems to be.

We are transitioning towards Modern Testing. I donā€™t think myself nor my team falls entirely into one bracket cleanly, as we have implemented some aspects of both Agile and Modern Testing. I have some Traditional testing methods I am moving away from as I learn.

Some ways I test are modern. I want to see metrics and data to justify our actions and continuously improve. Our team is Agile, and we use agile processes. I want to leverage these processes in a more lean way and ensure the time spent on the processes is focused on high value activities, and to toss any practices that are simply hurdles or checkboxes. Finally, I want to integrate more with other team members, especially product or business experts. I currently pair with other testers and developers, but I want to move more towards 3 Amigos.

When I have a more complete view of testing activities, I think my practice will trend towards Modern Testing.

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As an organisation this is difficult to answer as thereā€™s no clear pattern or common practice but as an individual I think that I would definitely fall under Modern Testing. Having started my career very much within traditional testing, I have spent at least 10 years working within teams using what most aligns with agile testing. However I now operate in a role outside of any dev team, championing quality and supporting our testing efforts whilst not actually doing much of the testing myself. There is definitely more to achieve with modern testing.

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(At the moment I have spare time to use my working time for training activities and so I am using the MoT Pro account to go through various coursesā€¦)

My or our testing activities are a mixture of agile and modern testing. There is no correct or specific answer, it depends a lot on what kind of project we are working in. We are working in agile environments and projects so we act as testing specialist in the teams - in those cases we do work as agile testers.

In your video @angryweasel you mention modern testing activity with ā€œcustomer obsessedā€ and ā€œpassionate about efficiencyā€ - but I would see them also in the agile testing activity world. IMO an experienced tester (m/f/d) has got those mindsets in agile and modern testing activities :wink: