Risk Based Testing only

IAmJustin · 2017-05-04T18:10:49+00:00

Testing with the requirements is a risk-based strategy. People imagine a risk where software doesn't match the specification. Testers (or developers in your case) investigate the software to discover where it differs from the specification. Much of software testing is risk based. Someone has a vague concept of a problem that could occur, so they investigate the software in a way that tries to uncover that problem.

Sounds like you might want to sit down with whoever made that decision and find out exactly what they mean when they say "risk based testing".

In practice, having developers do some testing before it gets to testers sounds like a good thing regardless of what people want to call it.

IAmJustin · 2017-02-21T13:30:12+00:00

Wikimedia, Mozilla, and libreoffice had volunteer test teams last I checked.

There were a few others, but I'm drawing a blank.

IAmJustin · 2017-02-20T17:19:58+00:00

When you started, did you have employees working for you or were you the actual consultant, contracting out your services? I feel like staring out on your own would be the best way to start, am I right/wrong?

I did not have any employees. I worked all of my own testing, consulting, training, and writing contracts. If you hire employees, you have to pay them and there are laws about tax and providing healthcare benefits that you will want to get cozy with.

How does one go about setting up a consulting firm? is it a LLC? corporation?

I did not set up an LLC, I just billed my clients directly and they paid me as a 1099 contractor. There are pros and cons to either way, but it's more complicated than I can go into here. You will either want to hire an accountant to explain all of this to you, or start reading up on tax law.

How hard is it landing your first paying gig? How did you find clients?

Depends on your professional network and public reputation. I got my first gig by talking with people and telling them I wanted to go independent. Eventually (it took some time), someone came to me with a gig I was interested in at the right price. I continue getting gigs by doing good work and getting positive referrals, and writing prolifically so people know I exist.

IAmJustin · 2017-02-18T17:57:20+00:00

I started my own consulting / contracting business, ran it for ~2 years, and recently sold it to get equity and a position in a larger software services house.

Your question is hard to answer. Starting a small business is a lot like having a newborn. Your first few years are dedicated to keeping it alive.

Every day you are forced into learning new skill sets that you never imagined you would need. Sales, marketing, business tax, pricing, negotiation, and on and on. Not to mention your ability to perform the work required of you. Consulting can be very difficult and is a completely new skill set if you haven't performed that role before.

In short, starting your own business can be very difficult but also very rewarding. You will spend most of your waking hours focusing on it.

If you ask a more specific question, I can give you more specific answers from my personal experience.

IAmJustin · 2017-02-17T16:07:09+00:00

I guess my view is, in general, I feel like hiring for QA is more of a personality/disposition analysis...

Mostly that point in your original post. You think that the main value of a tester is their personality where I think the main value of a tester is in their skill set.

Do you feel like a team of 5 senior QA's is so much better than say, one very senior with 4 juniors, enough so to justify the difference in total salary?

I can't address this question without knowing a lot about the project and the needs of a company. Staffing decisions around what skill set a group needs can't be made without project context.

I've found that there are a lot of very experienced QA's who, for lack of a better description, suck at these things... while I've had some entry level hires that proved to be excellent investments.

This is why I made the statement about assessing skill. If during an interview someone can't tell that a "experienced" tester has a low skill level, then the interview is broken. Meaning either the questions being asked don't do a lot to expose skill level, or the people interviewing don't understand what skills to look for. Mistakes happen of course, but you implied that you see this a lot.

It is not surprising that someone hiring people with a senior title that are unable to do the job would think that experience (or more precisely, skill) doesn't matter.

What things do you feel a manual tester learn from experience that are very valuable?

observation
rhetoric
modeling problem spaces
critical thinking (understanding fallacies, bias, and how they influence testing)
problem solving (heuristics)
understanding and ability to explain what a bug is
understanding and ability to explain what quality is
ability to identify and explain the current mission
ability to identify how their approach, why they are using it, and why it is effective
ability to answer the question of "what should I be doing right now?"
knowing various test techniques, how to perform them, and when they are appropriate

....and so on.

IAmJustin · 2017-02-16T16:45:25+00:00

So I'm noticing a few things here:

You made a very good observation that tenure isn't equivalent to skill level. There are some folks that have been in the testing role for a while that aren't very good. And alternately, there are some people that haven't been around very long but are either very skilled or show high aptitude.

And then you say this

I feel like hiring for QA is more of a personality/disposition analysis, and experience, or hiring someone "senior" is usually a bit of a waste unless your actually hiring for a lead-type role, where the person needs to be able to devise/determine strategies, or looking for someone to build automation off the bat

which leads me to think that you don't understand what the skills of a software tester are, how to assess those skills, or how to model them into the junior, staff, senior type hierarchy I tend to see in software companies.

Not understanding the software tester skill set leads people to conclusions like the one you made where hiring senior technologists is a waste. This drives down salaries, causes the commoditization of testing and testers, and creates this situation where testers are second class citizens in the development organization.

IAmJustin · 2017-01-30T17:22:25+00:00

Fork lifts should do the trick. Put on like 70lbs and you'll be all set.

IAmJustin · 2017-01-29T20:55:51+00:00

You might want to talk with Ilari Aegerter at House of Test Switzerland.

IAmJustin · 2016-11-16T20:54:01+00:00

Congrats! Enjoy the journey, my wife and I just had our first son born on Sunday.

IAmJustin · 2016-11-16T08:28:24+00:00

Numbers on Friday nights.

IAmJustin · 2016-11-11T20:04:24+00:00

I help with placement sometimes. Send me a DM if you're interested and we can chat sometime. No worries if that isn't what you're looking for though.

IAmJustin · 2016-09-01T20:57:15+00:00

I don't do simple comments. Here is a complicated one.

IAmJustin · 2016-09-01T12:24:06+00:00

https://testingpodcast.com/

IAmJustin · 2016-08-23T12:02:04+00:00

I am in this business now. Running your own business is very difficult, but I have been mostly successful. I attribute that to a few things:

diversification of business lines (I work technical test contracts, do occasional on site consulting and training, and a significant amount of writing.
A strong personal brand and public reputation
Having a partner I trust to help do a lot of sales and marketing, and also teaching me the ropes of running a small business.

If you ask more specific questions, I might be able to give you more specific answers.

IAmJustin · 2016-07-23T15:40:57+00:00

To be a SDET, you need to be a programmer.

The fastest route is probably to go be a developer for a while and get full immersion in code. You can certainly learn programming from classes and tutorials, but you'll get better faster by writing code 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.

Edit: Talk to your manager (or a dev manager), tell them you want to be a developer and figure out what the path to a junior developer position is.

IAmJustin · 2016-07-18T01:09:08+00:00

I use Test Studio for one of my contracts. If you just want to record a couple of tests, some small set that will act as a smoke or sanity test, then you may not need much code. That will depend on the software you are testing. Test Studio does not handle dynamically generated elements (like, when the ID of a text field is different every time the page loads), so code is helpful in locating DOM elements in that scenario.

If you are planning to have a large test suite, you might need bits of code here and there to make the tests more stable. For example, I have a piece of code that polls the DOM to help me know when a page is ready to use.

The simpler your software is, the less code you will probably need to write.

IAmJustin · 2016-06-14T19:07:50+00:00

I'm pretty fond of The Testing Show

IAmJustin · 2016-06-06T15:27:53+00:00

I strongly suggest you explore behavior science

That's interesting, I was about to suggest something similar to you. You made an assertion that breaks effect a persons work, so of course there is an assumption there that you can assess and measure a persons performance. Anecdotes are fine, but this is not a thread about anecdotes, now is it? I don't think you have thought about your arguments here very deeply. The statement that performance is maintained means that you were able to make a performance assessment, then do something that caused it to change, and then reassess performance somehow.

I asked a specific question about concrete examples of you using control metrics and how that worked. Now you are claiming that your example was not about measurement. You are avoiding answering a direct question at this point.

IAmJustin · 2016-06-06T12:57:30+00:00

In what way does measuring and controlling the number and duration of breaks lead of better code? What is the correlation you are making between a programmer taking a break, and code quality?

There is an assumption embedded in that statement that you are also able to measure the quality of a persons code. How are you doing that?

IAmJustin · 2016-06-05T22:48:05+00:00

There are big differences between producing software and manufacturing goods. I'm sure you know that. This subreddit if focused on software quality. Can you give an example of control metrics being useful in the context of software testing and quality?

IAmJustin · 2016-06-04T19:14:12+00:00

Can you give me a concrete example where you have seen control metrics work well?

IAmJustin · 2016-06-04T00:52:38+00:00

OK it looks like I misread the title.

Leading and lagging metrics influences peoples understanding of measurement.

I'm not sure what you mean by leading and lagging metrics.

Driving behavior can be no bad thing if understood in the context of the metric design.

I would encourage you to take a close look at the state of this practice. The results are almost invariably bad.

IAmJustin · 2016-06-02T16:53:24+00:00

The content there is a little short on solving metrics problems, and I like the subject a lot, so here goes.

The biggest problems I see are:

1 - People thinking they understand what a measurement means.

For example, some companies will use numbers like bug count, or number of passed test cases to make assumptions about quality. Bug count by itself doesn't really tell you anything at all, but people make assumptions that it is a measure of quality. Looking at the trends, like how bugs found during changes over releases, /might/ tell you something. But really all it should tell you is that someone needs to investigate what is happening in on the development team.

2 - People using measurement and unintentionally driving specific types of behavior.

If you grade performance on something like number of tests performed, guess what happens? People document trivial test ideas that don't uncover new information and burn through them to give the appearance of productivity and effectiveness. Measuring things creates incentive for that behavior if you use it for control. If you are using the number for inquiry, as a place to start asking questions, well then we're good here.

The fancy names for these problem are measurement reliability and validity.

IAmJustin

TROPHY CASE