Time: 5-10 Minutes
Purpose: Form a baseline of your thoughts about the Modern Testing Principles
Introduction: In this lesson, we talked a bit about where Modern Testing came from, and how we came up with the principles. Now, even with only a brief intro to the actual principles, let’s discuss your initial thoughts.
Activity:
Feel free to share and discuss your answers and reasoning here.
Which principles align the most with your current role?
Principle 1 - Our priority is improving the business.
Principle 3 - We are a force for continuous improvement, helping the team adapt and optimize in order to succeed, rather than providing a safety net to catch failures.
Principle 1 is why I wake up and go to work everyday. The goal of my work is to always move the needle towards improving the business - improving our revenue and outcomes where able as well as improving the team and my skills.
Principle 3 is how the team culture is setup. We work day in and day out striving to improve our product, our understanding of the product, and how it meets our customers needs (or may not and may need some experiments). We also don’t have a safety net setup, we have a team that relies upon each other to speak up and have debates on how to make the product (and ourselves) better everyday.
Which align the least?
Principle 7 - We expand testing abilities and knowhow across the team; understanding that this may reduce (or eliminate) the need for a dedicated testing specialist.
Principle 7 is something that I would like to do better for my team so that they are able to find issues faster than waiting for me to do a double check of their work. Our stories go through a refinement process where we communicate risks with the story (how it impacts the process and customer experience), but there are other tests that could be done by the team to find some issues sooner. I need to work on ways to grow the team’s testing ability.
Thanks again for sharing, Dwayne. Would love to hear if/how this changes as you work through the rest of the material.
Aligns the most:
Principle 4. But we are definitely not a point were the adverb “deeply” can be used. I try to push my QA team (this includes me as well) to think outside the box. And I see them coming up with new ideas here and there. What I like the most is that they do not fear interaction with people outside of “QA” and they do not hesitate to bring awareness to problems that in the end affect the company’s ability to ship a good product, no matter if the problem is directly affecting us or not.
Least align:
Principle 6. There are a couple to choose from but I would pick the data driven culture. Besides the fact that we basically do not have reliable data on how our customers interact with our software, I honestly doubt that this little piece of information is really used to make senseful decisions. It is not possible to really judge the last part because nobody, except a small circle of chosen ones, has participated in a meeting were said data was used as an argument. But I am happy to say that there is a big improvement planned and things in this area might change sooner than later. I think - and hope - we are going in the right direction
Align the most:
Continuous Improvement - I think this has always been a big drive for me personally and is one of the things which keeps me in Agile Software Development as a career. I love that we are all empowered and expected to challenge and improve things, to get better, to do better.
Quality Culture - Caring deeply about quality is what gets me up in the morning and makes me drive to work! I find a huge amount of satisfaction in building higher quality things and knowing I am a force for quality in what we do.
Align the least:
Data - This is something which, frankly, my teams and business suck at. We don’t have robust analytics and we lack the ability to use industry standard approaches here for certain business reasons. We really have limited idea how customers will use the software and lack good or reliable intel from the customer perspective.
Everyone Can Test - I do agree with this in principle but I am yet to be convinced of the truth that teams can do as well in terms of their quality without a dedicated testing specialist. I liken this to teams who run without a Scrum Master. I agree conceptually that a team could efficiently and responsibly delegate the work a dedicated scrum master does, yet I have never yet met a team who operate as well without one as with one, at least in the longer term. I feel the same is true of a quality specialist, but that teams without these tend to dip in quality far sooner and in far deeper ways.
Align the most.
I really hope that I’m aligning well with #4 & #7 as these are my primary two goals in my role!
Align the least:
Easy one. #6 - Data. I don’t have access to data. In fact as a business we have very poor access to data. The ability to understand who our users / customers are and how they use the software is a massive challenge.
Very interesting Modern Testing Principles.
I’ve read them several times and nodded my head to nearly all of them, because as an experienced software tester (or qa engineer etc) this should be the common ground and understanding for professional software testing. All the principles are really important, so there should be no rating really as they are all valid in my opinion. But in this exercise I should order them with “most” or “least” 
.
Align the most: 1, 2, 4, 6, 7
Align the least: 3, 5
I kind of disagree with 3) and “rather than providing a safety net to catch failures”. As I don’t know how you define failure… So should failures not be caught?
And at 5 in our case it is the quality of “his” product as we don’t do our own products
Principle 6: Given the nature of our organisation (Sovereign Wealth Fund) Data is key to what we do, all our investment decisions are driven from Data and as such much of our testing is very much data driven.