Testing

Changing the Perception – Working towards a Culture of Quality

Long ago was a time where testing was purely seen as an activity by a siloed team who executed 1000’s of tests towards the end of a project. In the modern world, this is still a very real situation in some areas, but on the whole, testing as a collaborative, continuous activity is much more the norm.

But getting to that stage is not easy, for some reason, there has historically been a stigma attached to testing as a lesser activity that slows the release of a project down and changing this mindset is a huge obstacle to get over.

In places where testing is perceived in a negative light, it is possible to move forward, but it will take hard work and use of the power of persuasion, while coaching and building collaborative best practices which a whole range of tech teams can buy into.

Improving the Perception of Testing Across the Business

When thinking about the need to move the view of testing forward, it’s really important that a number of steps are considered to help make it a success.

1. Define your End Goal

The most important decision to make when changing the perception is deciding what the goal is that you are aiming for. Is it just a more positive perception of what the Test teams do? Or is it a collaborative approach to testing where everyone is able to get involved when needed? Whatever the decision is, cementing this and having this to work towards is crucial.

2. Communicate what Testers Do

There may be common mis-conceptions with what Testers or QA do, what they are responsible for and what motivates them. These may come out in conversations, but in worse situations, assumptions will be made that Testers don’t need to be involved and therefore decisions are made without any testing input.

My personal way to deal with this, is to face this head on, any opportunity I get to talk about testing, I will. Within two months of joining my current role, I was presenting at an internal meeting to the whole technology department about “Growing a Culture of Quality” which involved talking about:

  • The common mis-conceptions of testing
  • What testers actually do
  • Showing where Testers could work collaboratively with other teams to improve quality
  • Highlighting the concepts of Testability and Continuous testing throughout a project
  • Inviting the wider business to join some lunch sessions with TestSphere

This set the groundwork for moving the team forward and eradicating any possible mis-conceptions of what testers do.

3. Spend Time Sharing Best Practices

TestSphere cards are a great activity to get conversations about testing going. I used these both internally within the Test team and also with the wider business to get folks talking about testing activities, and start to suggest ways in which activities can be incorporated.

By making yourself approachable and available for discussions, you will find that those chats over coffee become working meetings where suddenly “can you show me how we could test this more?” or “how can i create a set of tests which i can re-use?” become questions you will hear from non-testers who want to improve the quality of their work.

If you’re in a place where you have collaborative teams who work with you on the testing activities, embrace this but also look for the ways in which the communications could improve and with that, the testing activities could become even more effective.

Finding opportunities to share knowledge is a huge passion of mine, I firmly believe if I can help improve just one persons testing ability, I have done well.

I’ve run interactive workshops on identifying tests, where I’ve looked at heuristics, using TestSphere and other ways, rather than just the ISTQB defined techniques. Broadening the thought process has inevitably improved the testing quality. Running the same workshops with the wider business will help embed the knowledge wider and testers may find opportunities to help testing activities in teams where they weren’t aware they were even needed.

4. Share, Share, Share

Find ways to share blogs, webinars, conference talks and more with the test teams and the wider business. Build a passion from quality within the team and this will expand organically across the organisation. Not every tester is active or even aware of the online community of testers, none of my current team had heard of the Ministry of Testing or the Test Automation University until I signposted them to them, now people are attending events, webinars and taking courses when they have the opportunities.

I’m sure it gets annoying for some, but I’ve blogged several times internally on the company wide blog about testing and can also be seen occasionally wearing MoT or other testing t-shirts around which always guarantee questions from curious folk and yes, you guessed it, another chance to share even the smallest amount of knowledge.

5. Define New Processes and Prove the worth of Testing

Spend time learning the way things are done currently and understand why. Once you have that grounding, you can then explore options to embed new processes which may bring testing activities earlier or make quality part of discussions from the beginning.

One success I’ve had here is incorporating a Testability Assessment of the product requirements before it is “finalised”. This is again a chance for an open discussion with the test team and the wider business stakeholders to understand what is testable from the requirements and what needs more work to be refined and articulated better. This has enabled the team to understand more of the system earlier, ask probing questions which help to design a better system and be able to write more effective tests.

Another area of suggested improvement would be to look at measurable results which show the dial is moving in the right direction, this may be different for the context and organisation you are in, but the important step is again to communicate the metrics purpose and how they are generated widely before first use, so that everyone is on the same page with what it shows. This means the reporting can be more succinct as there won’t be the need to explain what it means each time.

It All Comes Down to Communication

Ultimately, as with most things in our world, communication is the foundation of all things great! A huge part of our role as Testing professionals is communicating effectively. This comes in many forms, but making our world accessible to all is imperative in creating a shared and collaborative culture of Quality throughout an organisation. Yes there will be difficult conversations along the way and some will take longer to come round than others, but stay close to the goal you defined at the start, understand whether you are moving closer to it and enable yourselves to course-correct if needed.

Management, Testing

We’re Not Dead! – The Art of Effective Test Leadership

The Tech industry is evolving faster than anyone is prepared for and with that, roles within the software world are in desperate need to change too, no more so than in the Testing world. With the demand for faster delivery, more complex tech stacks and more fluid ways of working, Testing roles and activities need to move too.

Test Managers as they are currently

One role which has been particularly highlighted in the trend of “traditional roles are dying” is that of the Test Manager. Taken from a Techwell article from 2018, this quote sums up the traditional test manager quite well –

In traditional software processes, test managers are responsible for all management aspects of their team. They dole out tasks and assignments, hold frequent meetings to stay on top of progress, review and approve estimates, and often provide technical guidance as well.

This traditional TM role is no longer effective and maybe not even relevant in a lot of companies (not all!), so there is a need to evolve the role. This is coming from a passionate Test Manager who wants to remain relevant and move both myself and my teams forward.

A siloed Test team who are only involved actively towards the end of a project is no longer the norm, so a TM being the only contact to the test team until the test phase is no longer enough. In some environments, it was the TM who provides that early estimate of the test effort on behalf of the team and will then hold their own team accountable to this value, they decide all resourcing, devise plans and communicate progress to the wider business. Their team left in the shadows until something goes wrong during testing or a defect leaks into production at which point the team are thrust into the spotlight.

The knowledge and accountability for testing and quality should no longer sit on the shoulders of one TM. The role of signing off on the quality of a product should not be the sole responsibility of the TM or even the test team and don’t get me started on the term “gatekeepers of quality”.

The Change to Test Leadership

While in some (if not most scenarios), the title of Test Manager won’t change (at least straight away), the underlying role needs to evolve and be fundamentally different. The role ultimately comes down to the following priorities:

1. Building an Effective Team

Identifying what your team needs to be, starts with understanding whether you are the type of leader your team would want to work for. Are your team able to do their best work? Are they set up for success? Are you all working towards the same goal? Do they believe in your testing values?

2. Nurturing, coaching and empowering the team –

Regular facetime with your team should be an important part of your time in the office. It’s not necessary to have big team meetings every day, but being around for 1-1s (ensuring they aren’t pushed out or cancelled regularly) where the focus is on them and their personal development and not project status. Give your team the confidence to feel they are making decisions on your behalf. This only becomes natural to them if you have worked closely with them to ensure you are on the same page and you’ve earned your trust from your team for them to know you will support them. Coaching and mentoring your team on testing and how to effectively communicate to the wider delivery team should be a key part of your discussions.

3. Being an advocate of your team and also of Testing best practices

You should be your teams protection and biggest cheerleader. When their leader is taking a collaborative decision which they have been involved in making to higher levels or other teams, the teams confidence will boom. Equally, when something does go wrong, protecting the team from the immediate backlash and then working with the team constructively to resolve an issue with an attitude of “we’re in this together” will go a long way to preserve the teams confidence and trust in you.

Also, the other part of your advocacy should be to promote testing best practices to the wider business, find opportunities to get the TestSphere cards out with other areas and discuss all the great work your team and the wider delivery teams are doing to ensure high quality will help raise the profile of your teams work and make everyone aware of what testing involves.

It really is important that the team feel you are on the same journey with them and not focussed on your own agenda. Yes you are their manager, but manager doesn’t mean you are above them. Your team are your biggest asset and working with them will make them more valuable

4. Being a servant leader

Management can be a thankless task, but being there for your team has to be your primary objective. Unblocking them so that they can excel should be one of your primary objectives. “How can I help you?” should be a common phrase your team hears from you, and you should always be working with them to improve their testing ability, empowering them to unblock themselves.

The primary goal of an effective leader is something one of the best managers I ever had passed on to me:

PEOPLE over PROJECTS

Ultimately, this means that your primary focus should be building, enabling and supporting your team instead of being “at the helm” and being the sole decision maker for all project work. If your team feel you have their back, they will feel empowered to make decisions that you would agree with.

That’s All Very Nice But What About Getting the Work Done?

In the modern agile or devops ways of working, it is very unlikely that if you have more than a few people, that they will all be working on the same project or the same features, so there may be a need for someone to be overseeing all progress across potentially many streams. This may not be a Test Manager, it may be an engineering manager or some form of delivery manager where dev/test etc is all combined. But there will still need to be someone who is the Test/Quality champion who can help improve the processes from a test perspective across the teams.

Ultimately, this will require you and your team to devise a process where it is easy for you to keep on top of all the moving parts. This may include devising dashboards which highlight progress and testing pain points for you to assist with. It may also mean ensuring you have the right metrics in place for real time testing progress to be quick to access.

Ensuring testing involvement during the whole project, advocating for Testability and other ways to build quality in earlier should be a focus of the whole team, but having someone driving this from a leadership perspective will help move the team forward.

Can I Still Be A Test Manager?

You can, but the role is evolving. The focus should now on your team and raising the awareness of Quality Engineering/Testing, rather than leaving it as a siloed activity and you being 100% accountable for the quality of the product.

 

 

 

 

Management, Neurodiversity, Testing

Thinking Differently – Embracing Neurodiversity in Tech

Diversity has rightly become a big topic of discussion across many media and in the last few years there have been huge movements globally to try and correct imbalances in the workforce. These have included Race, Gender, LGBTQ, Age and Physical Disabilities. A lot of companies have worked really hard to close the gaps within some of these diverse areas, but for me, one which has been relatively quiet, especially within Testing or even the wider Tech industry is Neurodiversity.

Before I dive further into this, what do we mean by Neurodiversity? (Quote taken from ACAS website  – acas.org.uk)

Neurodiversity refers to the different ways the brain can work and interpret information. It highlights that people naturally think about things differently. We have different interests and motivations, and are naturally better at some things and poorer at others.

Most people are neurotypical, meaning that the brain functions and processes information in the way society expects.

However it is estimated that around 1 in 7 people (more than 15% of people in the UK) are neurodivergent, meaning that the brain functions, learns and processes information differently.

To be classed as Neurodivergent, it usually means conditions such as Autism, Dyslexia, Dyspraxia or ADHD. There may be people within your teams that have one of these conditions and you may not even have ever been aware.

I have certainly worked with high-functioning neurodivergent engineers on both a peer-to-peer level and also manager-employee level. And I’m not just saying this for the sake of this article, but I have been awe-struck at time with how they have solved a problem or asked those questions that no-one else dare ask.

Certainly within Testing, it is not a role which requires uniformity or everyone fitting within the same box, we need out of the box thinkers and actually I found that one of my team was an incredible Exploratory tester, as his attention to detail was incredible but he had lots of ideas of pathways through the software which others would never have thought about. Indeed, a lot of the skills we look for in testing such as “Critical Thinking”, “Attention to detail”, “Seeing the bigger picture” are all things potentially in abundance within Neurodivergents. Although, maybe communication skills and stakeholder management may not be, but it comes to a point where we assess what we really need and can we work around the gaps in other ways?

I grew up with an Autistic sister, so for all of my life which I can remember, Autism has been something I have been very familiar with. This was added to, when I decided to fall in love with my wife, who for years has worked as a teacher in a Special Educational Needs (SEN) school, so I have learned a lot around Neurodiversity without really knowing what i was.

I do also think it is something that, the more I think about it, I have “quirks” which could be seen as “Neurodivergency”. I can relate a lot to my friend and fellow Testing Peer Chris’ blog post about his own self-discovery into ADHD, it could easily have been me who wrote that about myself. Maybe that is why it is an area which has peaked my interest so much?

In the workplace, I don’t feel enough is being done on multiple levels to ever really close the gap for potential Neurodivergent employees to be given a fair chance. 1 in 7 in the UK may be classed as Neurodivergent, but according to research done by Helen Needham for her recent TED Talk, they are 3 times more likely to be rejected for roles…

While I fundamentally believe that we should always hire the best candidate for any given role, are we even aware of untapped talent which we may have not even considered could fit the roles?

On an episode of the Super Testing Bros podcast last year, Lee Hawkins and Paul Seaman discussed their Neurodiversity project where they were teaching testing to autistic students. This was a fantastic listen and a great idea to reach out to a group not usually considered for roles within our industry. But it raises a lot of questions like the following:

  1. How can we raise the awareness of roles within our industry to more Neurodivergent candidates?
  2. How can we make our roles and our industry appealing?
  3. How could we change our hiring process to make these candidates feel able to participate?
  4. What could we do to make our work environment a place in which these potential employees would feel able to do there best work? Or what provisions could we put in place to ensure we supported them and helped them to be successful?

Raising the Awareness of Roles/Skills

As mentioned in the podcast above, Lee and Paul reached out to local organisations and had an Autistic charity take them up on teaching testing to students. So, I guess, in the same way some of us in the industry have started talking in schools and universities, another option would be to reach out to charities who are trying to help get people with Autism careers and working with local organisations to offer trainings of the necessary skills to get into testing or tech generally.

Making our Industry Appealing

As an industry, job adverts can be very varied in quality and detail. These can obviously be interpreted differently by different people, but think to yourself, would you role or company be appealing to a Neurodivergent candidate? Maybe they meet all the required skills to do the role, but don’t like doing presentations or talking to customers, would you be able to accomodate them and find other ways to complete the puzzle? We should see these candidates as a chance to see things differently, would they add something different to the team and make the team better? How can we therefore make these candidates want to work with us?

Making the Hiring Process Accessible

How do we feel our current hiring process would work with a Neurodivergent candidate? Is there any chance it could feel confrontational? How could you make it more accessible? Could interviews be carried out somewhere the candidate feels at ease? Could it be set as more of a chat, rather than an interview? If you know you have an Autistic candidate coming in, read up on Autism and learn about some of the triggers and things an autistic person may find difficult. A site worth browsing to learn more here would be medecoded.com – a site with experience reports and articles from neurodiverse employees and how they work…

Find a way to ensure you get all you need from the interview process but also ensure you’re not putting so much effort into the neurodivergent candidates, that you are neglecting any neurotypical candidates.

Enable Them to Be Successful

Ok, so you have hired them, but now, how do you ensure they fit within the team and the ways of working? Work with them to find a way for them to be successful. You may find the open plan office is a pain point for them, maybe they need a set of noise cancelling headphones to enable them to work in silence? Are there quiet areas where they can take themselves off to work? You may find they have some habits which seem odd to others, but will probably be partly a way of them self-regulating and keeping themselves calm. Make allowances for this and support them to ensure the team as a whole allow for this too. Ultimately, as with any employee, you want to help make them the best version of themselves they can be at work, doing all you can to nurture the talent will go a long way with that.

It really isn’t however about putting a label on these people, a lot are working perfectly fine within the tech industry already, but it is about considering them equally with other talent going for a role and learning a bit about how to get the most out of them, if you do decide to hire.

Management

My Personal Leadership Values

Following on from my previous post which focused on my personal testing values, this one will look at my Leadership values.

I guess the first point to elaborate on is what is meant by Leadership?

The dictionary definition suggests:

“The action of leading a group of people or an organisation, or the ability to do this”

My experience with leadership actually started as a teenager when I was an active member of the Air Cadets, reaching the rank of Flight Sergeant, meaning I was responsible for up to 30 cadets on any activity which we were completing, the go-to person for the adult staff members and even the one to be giving the orders when marching on parades or in competitions. This set me up with an understanding of what leadership/management could be, but as I decided not to follow the military career, I found that this particular style of leadership is often frowned upon in the workplace.

Since becoming a Manager and having a team which report to me, I was given a lot of guidance early on which showed me how important your people are and as daft as that sounds, I have experienced scenarios where this has been lost and because of this, I always try my best to ensure my team have everything they need from me. I even put myself on a Mental Health First Aider training course, so that I could be there to help my team if and when they need it.

So with that, I have 4 key values which I try to ensure I always show my team

  1. Protect – I know in a lot of scenarios, the manager is the face of a team, it’s therefore important that you serve the role of keeping the team out of the firing line where necessary and also ensuring they are ring fenced from work/ distractions which they don’t need to be involved in. That doesn’t mean you wouldn’t go to the team to get insight on an issue, but you do the heavy lifting and ensure they can stay focussed on what they should be doing.
  2. Nurture – Sometimes, your team members need to know you have their back! sometimes they need a metaphorical arm around them to let them know it’s okay! Not everyone can be on their game all of the time, a manager that recognises this and supports their team when they need it can be hugely beneficial. This also leads to encouraging them to try to improve themselves and helping to coach them down the path to the next level. Celebrating successes, however small, can really encourage them to keep going.
  3. Empower – Sometimes, the decision needs to be made by the manager, but it is still important to take into account the opinions of the team, you may ultimately disregard them, but giving them the opportunity to have a voice can go a long way to building their confidence. Enabling them to make decisions and you going with them will help grow their leadership skills too. There is nothing better than to have a capable team of leaders which you have helped grow.
  4. Evangelise – As well as protecting the team from the hierarchy, it’s equally important to take their work and promote it. In my eyes, the manager should be the teams biggest supporter and sing their praises whenever they can. A lot of teams I have been part of, have felt like no one knows what they do. That can be changed by ensuring you are their biggest advocate and try to ensure it is known what value the team provides.

Of course, that makes it sound easy and ultimately, it will never always be plain sailing. You will have to cope with difficult scenarios both within the team and outside the team, but having these values in mind will help you ensure your team has what they need to be successful.

Testing

My Personal Testing Values

As I am currently going through a transition in my career of moving companies for the first time since i got a graduate position 12 years ago, it has really become clear to me how important it is to have personal values not just for your life as a whole but equally for your work life. Having values which act as indicators that something needs to change is a way of knowing when and how to adapt, if you need to.

It was these exact values which kicked me into gear with the career change. I wasn’t living by my working values any more and something therefore needed to be changed.

I in fact have two sets of values which I try and follow for work:

  1. My Testing Values
  2. My Leadership Values

This post will focus on my testing values. I will provide a later post which looks at the leadership values. So what are these values which I hold so close? Let me try and give some detail around my thoughts:

Testing is A Mindset –

    I’ve learned this more as I started having to hire testers, but not everyone is cut out for testing. It may be true that anyone can test, but it takes someone with the right mindset to test deep and test well.

Testing Isn’t just identifying and executing scenarios –

    Testing starts with the questions, with the probing and the digging for information. Ultimately, the results of testing is providing information to the decision makers, we should not be responsible only for a list of pass/fail results, we have so much more to offer.

Testing starts as a project starts

    – We should be involved in conversations at a start of a project, we shouldn’t be left to piece together requirements at a later stage. We should be involved (where possible) in assisting to form the requirements and putting them through their paces before any code is written.

100% of Testing being automated should never be a consideration –

    If I see one more LinkedIn thread on this topic, I will explode. I maybe need to be more open minded somehow, but I can only see automation as a tool to aid a tester, not to replace them. It should be a single tool in a testers toolkit, not someone’s entire toolbox. Good automation also does not just run a series of test cases which would otherwise have been run manually, it can (and should) do so much more.

Test Team and/or Testing is valued as highly as other disciplines within a team/organisation

    – For a long time, I had worked in teams where Testing was seen as the second class citizen in the room. Time for testing was shrunk because the true value testing provided was never given chance to be shown. It’s a case of making awareness of testing a part of our role. All project team members should know what they are getting from testers and there should be the same respect and time given to testing as there is to writing the product code or operationalising it.

So those are what I try to ensure my testing work aligns to and as I took on a leadership role in testing, i have always tried to ensure my team are aware of these values and how they can improve their focus and work based on these

Would love to hear feedback on these. As mentioned before, I will do another post on my leadership values…

Management

The “No Desk” Experiment – Working Closer With My Team

Ever since becoming a manager, my motto has always been “People before Projects”, meaning that ultimately, if I provided my team everything they need, then the project work would take care of itself.

Working for a big corporation which has a lot of moving parts, meant that for a while, I was consistently in 6 hours plus of meetings per day, each one believed to be the most important by it’s respective organiser. It got to the point where the only time I would read emails would be in the evening after the kids had gone to bed, and as for having time to spend with my team, well apart from my scheduled 1-1s, there was very little. Sure I would stop by their desks and try and check they were ok in between my meetings, but I felt I was failing them as a team. So i decided to try and change my days in the office.

Firstly, I made the assessment on the meetings I HAD to attend, compared to the ones I wasn’t compulsory for and could either decline or pass on to one of my team to attend instead. This in itself, cut my meetings down to an average of 4 hrs per day which can still be a bit overwhelming some days, but is certainly more manageable.

The next step was, how do I give more to my team, at least now in the period where I have two junior new starters? Firstly I changed my 1-1 structure, I left my laptop at my desk, took a notepad and pen and asked them how they were, how I could help them and tried to show support for what they needed. The problem with taking a laptop was that if emails fly in during the meetings, it was easy to get distracted.

Secondly, I came up with a drastic solution, which I trialed for a week. Whenever not in meetings, I decided I would literally hot-desk around the Development and QA team members, meaning I would spend time sat with the team, understand the projects in more detail and offer assistance in any way I could.

This meant I could start doing what I’d been trying to get around to before bureaucracy got in the way and that was coach my team members and use snippets of the years of knowledge I had to share. If one of my team was putting together a Test Plan or Test Scenarios, I was able to review them while sat with them, rather than them sending it to me via email and my thoughts being sent back maybe a couple of days later.

I was able to respond straight away to any concerns, we could go for coffee and discuss the issue as soon as they came to me, rather than me telling them I’d get back to them when I was free.

I felt more aware of the day to day project work and the technical difficulties the team may be experiencing, I was hearing it all first hand, rather than through chinese whispers by the time it reached me.

I was worried the team would respond negatively to me being around, maybe see me as “checking up” on them or trying to micro-manage, but the response I got from the team was hugely positive. Mainly because I was more plugged into the day-to-day work, they were able to start conversations on that level, rather than bringing me up to speed first before getting to the point.

I took them all out for lunch that week too and it all just added to the point I was trying to make with the whole week, I value them all and I want to ensure I give them all the tools and time they need to do their jobs to the best of their ability.

While the obvious solution is to try and engineer a desk in the middle of the team, that isn’t immediately possible, but what is possible is to find every moment I can to be available for them. That still means I have work to do and emails to read, but it’s about being organised enough to allow the time while you are all in the office together, to be as around as they need from me. The team will grow and develop and in the same way children become more independent from their parents,  the team will grow and become self sufficient, then the job of coaching them will take a back seat and the focus for me can then switch. But while they need me, I will continue trying to make myself free for any time they want from me.

Testing

Are Some of Us Doing it Wrong?

I love the Testing Community, there are so many opportunities to share knowledge, talk to others, attend events and learn. Of course, there are always different perspectives, different opinions and different ideas and this is part of what makes the community so great!

I had heard the term “Imposter Syndrome” banded about for the last few years and never really felt it myself, but recently, I have not only experienced it myself, it actually brought a sense of “Am I doing it wrong?” and having had some conversations on social media and recently at UKStar, I started to realise I wasn’t alone. To the point that people were deciding to not attend events because they didn’t feel good enough.

This was also inspired by a thread on twitter by @AllCapsTester:

Let me give a bit more context, recently there have been some phrases thrown around:

  • “Test cases are dead!”
  • “There is no need for dedicated Testers anymore”
  • “Everyone is doing Agile/DevOps”
  • “Testers need to code”

Now I’m not saying any of these phrases are wrong, but they are communicated like they are the norm. Of course, there are a huge amount of innovative people in the community that have inspiring ideas and have brought them to fruition, but for as many that are following innovative methods, there are probably just as many who still following waterfall with a team of dedicated QA who write hundreds of manual test cases. Does that make them bad Testers? No. Are they doing something wrong? Of course not. Does that mean we should avoid working for those companies? Probably not.

Don’t get me wrong, there is always room for improvement and I’m sure the above mentioned are improving what they do to ensure there Testing is as effective as it can be. All should be able to appreciate what they do and not feel like they aren’t good enough.

I have also found Social Media is not always the place to have discussions about the above points as it can be quite intimidating. Semantics can be argued over and increasingly can make people feel like they aren’t good enough.

So it’s really a simple plea, when talking about an innovative solution to move the industry forward, please don’t talk about it like everyone is already doing it. Let’s embrace the abilities of everyone in our industry. We are only moving forward as fast as our slowest member, let’s help get everyone to to be the best they can be and feel like they are doing a good job, even if they aren’t up with the latest ideas.

Testing

UKStar 2018 – Fuelling the Passion

My first conference since TestBash in 2015 and I had genuinely forgotten the buzz that these events provide. There was a real sense of community, I made some new contacts, caught up with people I had met before and generally networked with everyone who would talk to me.

On top of that, I would also be giving my first talk on the 2nd day, something which typically, I had spent the week or so before stressing about it, but I really shouldn’t have worried.

There were some great talks which I really felt I learnt a lot from and others which have inspired me to do more of this!

Here are some of the talks which really stood out for me:

Christina Ohanian – Growing a Testing community of practice and navigating ‘traditional’ mindsets”

Christina’s keynote really set the tone for the two days. She talked about her journey to where she is now which included some of the hurdles which resonate with me. Hurdles such as the perception that testers are responsible for quality, testers are just there to find bugs and that everything needs to be automated. She gave hope that these hurdles can be overcome and also that working on the concept of a Community of Practice can really help convince some of the ‘old-fashioned’ mindsets which may be blocking progress. I’m hoping to start an internal Community of Practice for Testing and will be using ideas from Christina’s talk to help me get there.

Ali Hill – Learning to Become a More Technical Tester

Ali presented his first conference talk and went through the path that has brought him to his current role at Craneware. It was impressive to see the effort he has gone through to ensure he had the right skills to do his role, especially given he came from a background of a non-technical degree. Ali shared the steps he had taken to become more technical, including getting involved in the Automation Strategies, learning to code enough to help with the API testing, working on Performance testing and having monitoring in the production environment. The key points he made was really about finding allies and pacing yourself, these are key messages which anyone should consider when learning a new skill.

Isabel Evans – Leadership, Fellowship and Followship

Isabel’s keynote at the start of the second day set the positive tone for the day, it touched on some topics around how we could be made to feel in our teams as a tester and used examples of different animals to explain team dynamics. She also talked about the different types of followers and leaders, which I intend to use with my team to find out how we all fit together.

Isabel had a great way of explaining some of the tough issues and touched on mental health issues within work and it was very inspirational to hear her stories of how she has coped in difficult situations.

I also enjoyed talks from Richard Paterson where he talked about convincing people to share stories if they have something to share about Testing as too many people find every excuse not to. James Lyndsay’s hands on session was engaging while understanding the “Basic Pathologies of a simple system”. Marianne Duijst’s enthusiasm during her talk was just phenomenal and the concept of the 24hr Innovation event is something I would certainly love to try. I also loved the concept of the Conversation Track, I attended Yann and Viktor’s session on the Monday and thought the concept and the presentations were great. I especially related to Viktor’s talk aboth the Testing Survival as alot of the issues he mentioned (lack of documentation, having to automate everything etc), were things that are regularly being lived by many teams all over the world.

Both workshops I attended were engaging and I felt like I learned something new – Christina Ohanian and Nicola Sedgwick’s on Day 1 and Isabel Evans’ on day two. Both these provided the opportunity to work in groups with others and get a chance to talk to new people.

Then there was my talk… Part of a conversation track with Joel Montvelisky, I had spent some time with Joel before the conference and also attending the London Tester Gathering on the Monday night to see him talk. Joel is a great presenter and really enthusiastic about Testing and particularly the concepts of Modern Testing.

I loved presenting my topic, and hope my enthusiasm for raising awareness came through. I believe the general reaction was positive and I certainly had a lot of comments and questions which suggested to me, it’s a topic which needs exploring further. The key sticking points which were suggested were that we maybe shouldn’t just be looking at University students as some delegates said, they never attended university and they have since had a successful career. The other point to make was that the skills suggested for #MakeATester were all soft skills and a University would find these difficult to teach. This is something which needs more exploration, but having completed the talk, I have a few more people willing to work with me to keep raising the awareness.

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The conference was a great experience and I really can’t thank the organisers enough for asking me to talk and giving me the chance to fuel my passion of continuous learning and growing my knowledge for my career.

Management, Testing

A Change in Perspective – Moving from Tech Lead to Manager

I’ve been in Software Engineering since I left University as a graduate in 2006 and have performed many roles such as Software Developer, Scrum Master, Build Engineer and then in 2010, I moved into Software QA. At that point, I had several awesome mentors who I owe so much for fueling my love and passion for all things Testing/QA.

Fast-forward 6 years and I had moved teams and become the QA Tech Lead in my new team which are an Operations Engineering team. I finally got my head around the complexities of the systems we were responsible for as a team and was starting to move the teams focus to processes and ways in which i felt could move the team forward. So at this point, I felt I had got to grips with the production process.

In 2017, I started working towards becoming the manager of the local team and also taking on hiring a new team for a second project. That team were to be located in Ireland and I took on building that team from scratch. Hiring that team was my first real taste of management responsibilities. I had previously been involved in hiring from a “who would I work well with?” perspective, where as now, I was looking at the overall dynamics of the team, how they fit salary wise with the rest of the team and whether there was anything about them that might make them difficult to manage. This really opened my eyes to how things would change with my new role.

Over the next year or so, to now, there were several other parts of the role which opened my eyes to there being more differences than me just taking on line management duty of my team mates.

1. Trusting the team to be Technical

Once I got the Irish team set up, it became obvious that I couldn’t be the technical point of contact for two teams and had to start backing away from the deep down technical details and trust the teams to pick that up. It really became clear that I had to trust my team to pick up the details and I needed to enable to do them that.

 2. Time is for your People

I soon learnt that to enable the team, it required them to be my main focus. Therefore, giving them all time with me, through 1-1s and spending time sat with them at their desks, meant that I started working longer hours to give them the time they wanted/needed and then still performing the other duties i still needed to do. Over time, this has got easier to manage, but with two teams on completely different projects, it’s certainly been a challenge.

3. Difficult Conversations

One element of the role which I needed to adjust to, was having to have conversations which I wouldn’t have previously had to worry about. It really was about working out where the line is in situations and then being strong enough to talk to team members when that line is crossed. Then also being consistent to ensure that everyone is treated the same way.

4. Technical Advocate rather than Technical Leader

With having to trust the team to take on the technical leadership role, it became clear that although I still need to understand the technical detail to some degree, I would give the team the freedom to advise me on technical directions, then be their advocate when talking to others about the technology, ensuring the team know I have their back and support their decisions. While also still offering my opinion and helping to guide the team, the directions of the team would not be down to just me.

5. Someone Resigned! Was it Because of Me?

This was a tough lesson, and caused a lot of over analysing and over thinking. But ultimately, I had to try and not take it personally. Then, secondly, try to turn it into a positive as it would give me a chance to re-build the team in the way that I feel works.

6. No Favourtism

Before I became a manager, I felt I got on well with all the team I worked with, but becoming manager changed the dynamics. Some suddenly started being more formal with me and I couldn’t understand why as I hadn’t changed. There were some members who I found very easy to talk to, but I had to show that I valued all members of the team. That meant backing away from socialising with them regularly over lunch or out of work and only really doing so when all the team is present.

The Future

I love my role and I love the fact that I am learning and developing every day. I value the work my team are now able to do, with my guidance and seeing them become more self sufficient, means I am starting to be able to focus on more strategic work and still see my teams move forward, knowing I have their back, encouraging them to do the best they can.

 

 

 

Testing

It’s Been A While – A #MakeATester Update

In Summer 2016, i kicked off the #MakeATester project on social media, asking for the community and beyond to tell me what skills are needed for new testers to get started in a testing career. I published the results in early 2017 and since then, have been working hard to try and push the awareness of the project with it’s original aim, which was to get more awareness of Software Testing in Universities, enabling graduates to consider testing roles when they leave university.

So what has happened since then?

  1. I submitted a talk to several conferences (maybe i haven’t quite got the hang of the talk submissions for some conferences) and in March this year, i have a slot at UKStar 2018. As part of a “Conversation Track”, I get to share my message and urge others to consider reaching out to universities.   https://ukstar.eurostarsoftwaretesting.com/submission/if-the-universities-wont-help-us-how-do-we-makeatester/
  2. I have started reaching out to universities to give careers talks on testing. Some have been re-buffed with a “sorry, we don’t teach that!” message. I have two lined up in the next few months. One of which is a pure Software Testing careers talk, the other is more focussed on the CyberSecurity careers, but I am fully intending to have a few slides mentioning Testing 🙂
  3. I’d like to find other methods and media to get this message out further, so if anyone has any ideas, please get in touch, either through the blog, or through my twitter account (@siprior)

What would I like next?

I have two things I would like to start from here:

  1. It would be good if I could add a bit of meat behind my message to Universities and as part of reaching out to them and offering career talks, I’d like to also provide the universities with the types of topics they should be covering if they run a Testing module or two.
  2. I can’t do this alone, I would love for all of the testing community to feel empowered to reach out to Universities and other talent who may be unaware of testing careers and would be good fits for roles, and let them know of the rewarding options they have in front of them.

Getting new people into testing should not be as hard as I have found it when hiring for my team.

We have the resources available to get people interested in testing. Podcasts, blogs, online courses, videos, and an immense community always willing to help people with their testing questions.

Now it’s time to start building on what we have and start looking outwards from our community and drawing more in.

Am I barking up the wrong tree? Am I making a mountain out of a molehill? Maybe elsewhere, this isn’t an issue. Let me know your thoughts. 🙂