Skip to main content

Listens Learned in Software Testing


I'm enjoying the way the Test team book club at Linguamatics has been using our reading material as a jumping-off point for discussion about our experiences, about testing theory, and about other writing. This week's book was a classic, Lessons Learned in Software Testing, and we set ourselves the goal of each finding three lessons from the book that we found interesting for some reason, and making up one lesson of our own to share.

Although Lessons Learned was the first book I bought when I became a tester, in recent times I have been more consciously influenced by Jerry Weinberg. So I was interested to see how my opinions compare to the hard-won suggestions of Kaner, Bach and Petttichord.

For this exercise I chose to focus on Chapter 9, Managing the Testing Group. There are 35 lessons here and, to the extent that it's possible to say with accuracy given the multifaceted recommendations in many of them, I reckon there's probably only a handful that I don't practice to some extent.

One example: When recruiting, ask for work samples (Lesson 243). This advice is not about materials produced during the  interview process. It is specifically about bug reports, code, white papers and so on from previous employments or open source projects. I can't think of an occasion when I've asked for that kind of thing from a tester.

Of the 30 or so lessons that I do recognise in my practices, here's three that speak to me particularly today: Help new testers succeed (Lesson 220), Evaluate your staff as executives (Lesson 213), The morale of your staff is an important asset (Lesson 226).

Why these? Well, on another day it might be three others - that's what I've found with this book over the years - but in the last 12 months or so our team has grown by 50% and we've introduced line management structure. This triplet speak to each of those changes and the team as a whole, as we work through them.

When bringing new people into our team we have evolved an induction process which has them pair with everyone else on the team at least a couple of times, provides a nominated "first point of contact", a checklist of stuff to cover in each of the first days, weeks and months, a bunch of introductions to the Test team and company (from within the team) and to other parts of the company (from friendly folk in other groups). We also have the new person present to the team informally about themselves and their testing, to help us to get to know them, develop some empathy for them, to give them some confidence about talking in front of the established staff. Part of the induction process is to provide feedback on the induction process (this is not Fight Club!) which we use to tune the next round.

Until this year, I have conducted all annual reviews for all of the testers in my team. This affords me the luxury of not having to have externalised the way in which I do it. That's not to say that I haven't thought about it (I have, believe me, a lot) or that I haven't evolved (again, I have) but more that I haven't felt the need to formally document it. Now that there are other line managers in the team I have begun that process by trying to write it down (almost always a valuable exercise for me) and explaining it verbally (likewise; particularly when doing it to a bunch of intelligent, questioning testers).

How to assess the performance and development needs of your team (fairly) is tricky. The notion of executive in Lesson 213 is from Drucker - "someone who manages the value of her own time and affects the ability of the organisation to perform" as Lesson 211 puts it - and essentially cautions against simple metrics for performance in favour of a wide spread of assessments, at least some of which are qualitative, that happen regularly and frequently. It recommends paying attention to your staff, but contrasts this with micromanagement.

Past experience tells me that there is almost never consensus on a course of action within my teams and I rarely get complete agreement on the value of an outcome either. However, it's important to me to be as inclusive and open and transparent as possible about what I'm doing, in part because that's my philosophical standpoint but also because I think that it contributes to team morale, and that is crucial to me (Lesson 226) because I think a happy team is in a position to do their best work.

When planning and going through the kind of growth and restructuring that our team has in the last 12 months, morale was one of my major concerns - of the new hires, of the existing team members, and also of myself. It's my intuition that important aspects of building and maintaining morale in this kind of situation include providing access to information, opportunity to contribute, and understanding of the motivation.

I didn't want anyone to feel that changes were just dropped on them, that they weren't aware that changes were coming, that they had no agency, that they hadn't had chance to ask questions or express their preferences or suggestions, and that I hadn't tried to explain what options were being considered and why I made the particular changes that I did, and what my concerns about it are, and that my full support is available to anyone who wants or needs it.

The lesson of my own that I chose to present is one I've come back to numerous times over the years:

  If you can, listen first.

Listening here is really a proxy for the intake of information through any channel, although listening itself is a particularly important skill in person-to-person interactions. Noticing the non-verbal cues that come along with those conversations is also important, and likewise remembering that the words as said are not necessarily the words as meant.

Since reading What Did You Say? I have become much more circumspect about offering feedback. Feedback is certainly part of the management role - any manager who is not willing to give it when requested is likely not supporting their staff to the fullest extent they could - but feeling that it's the manager's role to dispense feedback at (their own) will is something I've come to reject.

These days I try to practice congruent management and a substantial part of that is that it requires understanding - of the other person, the context and yourself. Getting data on the first two is important to aid understanding, and listening - really listening, not just not speaking - is a great data-gathering tactic. The Mom Test, which I read recently, makes essentially the same point over and over and over. And over.

Listening isn't always pleasant - I think, for example, of a 30-minute enumeration of things a colleague felt I hadn't done well - but I try to remember that the other person - if being honest - is expressing a legitimate perspective - theirs - and understanding it and where it comes from - for them - is likely to help me to understand the true meaning of the communication and help me to deal with it appropriately.

And that's a lesson in itself: managing is substantially about doing your best to deal with things appropriately.
Image: Wiley

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Can Code, Can't Code, Is Useful

The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book,  Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide  responses to common questions and statements about testing from a  context-driven perspective . It's being edited by  Lee Hawkins  who is  posing questions on  Twitter ,   LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST  mailing list  and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to  contribute  by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me?   --00-- "If testers can’t code, they’re of no use to us" My first reaction is to wonder what you expect from your testers. I am immediately interested in your working context and the way

Meet Me Halfway?

  The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book,  Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide  responses to common questions and statements about testing from a  context-driven perspective . It's being edited by  Lee Hawkins  who is  posing questions on  Twitter ,   LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST  mailing list  and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to  contribute  by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me?   --00-- "Stop answering my questions with questions." Sure, I can do that. In return, please stop asking me questions so open to interpretation that any answer would be almost meaningless and certa

Not Strictly for the Birds

  One of my chores takes me outside early in the morning and, if I time it right, I get to hear a charming chorus of birdsong from the trees in the gardens down our road, a relaxing layered soundscape of tuneful calls, chatter, and chirrupping. Interestingly, although I can tell from the number and variety of trills that there must be a large number of birds around, they are tricky to spot. I have found that by staring loosely at something, such as the silhouette of a tree's crown against the slowly brightening sky, I see more birds out of the corner of my eye than if I scan to look for them. The reason seems to be that my peripheral vision picks up movement against the wider background that direct inspection can miss. An optometrist I am not, but I do find myself staring at data a great deal, seeking relationships, patterns, or gaps. I idly wondered whether, if I filled my visual field with data, I might be able to exploit my peripheral vision in that quest. I have a wide monito

Testing (AI) is Testing

Last November I gave a talk, Random Exploration of a Chatbot API , at the BCS Testing, Diversity, AI Conference .  It was a nice surprise afterwards to be offered a book from their catalogue and I chose Artificial Intelligence and Software Testing by Rex Black, James Davenport, Joanna Olszewska, Jeremias Rößler, Adam Leon Smith, and Jonathon Wright.  This week, on a couple of train journeys around East Anglia, I read it and made sketchnotes. As someone not deeply into this field, but who has been experimenting with AI as a testing tool at work, I found the landscape view provided by the book interesting, particularly the lists: of challenges in testing AI, of approaches to testing AI, and of quality aspects to consider when evaluating AI.  Despite the hype around the area right now there's much that any competent tester will be familiar with, and skills that translate directly. Where there's likely to be novelty is in the technology, and the technical domain, and the effect of

Postman Curlections

My team has been building a new service over the last few months. Until recently all the data it needs has been ingested at startup and our focus has been on the logic that processes the data, architecture, and infrastructure. This week we introduced a couple of new endpoints that enable the creation (through an HTTP POST) and update (PUT) of the fundamental data type (we call it a definition ) that the service operates on. I picked up the task of smoke testing the first implementations. I started out by asking the system under test to show me what it can do by using Postman to submit requests and inspecting the results. It was the kinds of things you'd imagine, including: submit some definitions (of various structure, size, intent, name, identifiers, etc) resubmit the same definitions (identical, sharing keys, with variations, etc) retrieve the submitted definitions (using whatever endpoints exist to show some view of them) compare definitions I submitted fro

Testers are Gate-Crashers

  The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book,  Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide  responses to common questions and statements about testing from a  context-driven perspective . It's being edited by  Lee Hawkins  who is  posing questions on  Twitter ,   LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST  mailing list  and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to  contribute  by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me?   --00-- "Testers are the gatekeepers of quality" Instinctively I don't like the sound of that, but I wonder what you mean by it. Perhaps one or more of these? Testers set the quality sta

Vanilla Flavour Testing

I have been pairing with a new developer colleague recently. In our last session he asked me "is this normal testing?" saying that he'd never seen anything like it anywhere else that he'd worked. We finished the task we were on and then chatted about his question for a few minutes. This is a short summary of what I said. I would describe myself as context-driven . I don't take the same approach to testing every time, except in a meta way. I try to understand the important questions, who they are important to, and what the constraints on the work are. With that knowledge I look for productive, pragmatic, ways to explore whatever we're looking at to uncover valuable information or find a way to move on. I write test notes as I work in a format that I have found to be useful to me, colleagues, and stakeholders. For me, the notes should clearly state the mission and give a tl;dr summary of the findings and I like them to be public while I'm working not just w

Build Quality

  The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book,  Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide  responses to common questions and statements about testing from a  context-driven perspective . It's being edited by  Lee Hawkins  who is  posing questions on  Twitter ,   LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST  mailing list  and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to  contribute  by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me?   --00-- "When the build is green, the product is of sufficient quality to release" An interesting take, and one I wouldn't agree with in general. That surprises you? Well, ho

Make, Fix, and Test

A few weeks ago, in A Good Tester is All Over the Place , Joep Schuurkes described a model of testing work based on three axes: do testing yourself or support testing by others be embedded in a team or be part of a separate team do your job or improve the system It resonated with me and the other testers I shared it with at work, and it resurfaced in my mind while I was reflecting on some of the tasks I've picked up recently and what they have involved, at least in the way I've chosen to address them. Here's three examples: Documentation Generation We have an internal tool that generates documentation in Confluence by extracting and combining images and text from a handful of sources. Although useful, it ran very slowly or not at all so one of the developers performed major surgery on it. Up to that point, I had never taken much interest in the tool and I could have safely ignored this piece of work too because it would have been tested by

The Best Laid Test Plans

The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book,  Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide  responses to common questions and statements about testing from a  context-driven perspective . It's being edited by  Lee Hawkins  who is  posing questions on  Twitter ,   LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST  mailing list  and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to  contribute  by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me?   --00-- "What's the best format for a test plan?" I'll side-step the conversation about what a test plan is and just say that the format you should use is one that works for you, your coll