Gojko Adzic

During the ‘Agile Quality Management – Axiom or Oxymoron?’ talk at Agile Testing Days today in Berlin, David Evans from SQS talked about several aspects of agile development that often confuse and scare traditional test managers. One of the aspects that was particularly interesting to me is the fact that there is no test management role in agile literature. Test managers are often “afraid that they’ll disappear in a puff of logic when agile testing starts”, said Evans. Continue Reading »

Lisa Crispin gave a keynote at Agile Testing Days conference in Berlin today, discussing the topic of staffing an agile team with testers, in particular whether any tester can be on an agile team or are agile testers different from the rest. Crispin and Janet Gregory interviewed a lot of testers while working on their book and found that lots of people they interviewed had similar experiences and traits. According to Crispin, an agile tester mindset is such that they: Continue Reading »

Although Selenium is an essential trace element, it is toxic if taken in excess. That is what Wikipedia has to say on the chemical element Selenium, but pretty much sums up my feelings about the web testing tool of the same name as well. I like very much how easy it is to implement web tests with Selenium, but I’ve seen so many teams shoot themselves in the foot by misusing it and wasting a ton of time on writing and executing tests that simply got thrown away on the end. The Page Object pattern, popularised by Simon Stewart with WebDriver, seems to be the universally accepted best practice to manage UI tests efficiently and the preferred way to implement Selenium tests. However, at the recent CITCON Europe conference in Paris, Antony Marcano spoke against this and offered an alternative. Continue Reading »

The most important take-away idea from CITCON Europe this year for me was probably building ‘save game’ functionality as an integral feature in software systems.

Antony Marcano talked about this, not as part of the official programme but over beers which is another example of how informal chatting at conferences is often more valuable than the schedule. He mentioned how it is common for games to automatically save the complete state at checkpoints. This allows us to easily go back to the last saved position and continue playing if our character gets killed for whatever reason. So if something really bad happens after 10 hours of playing, you don’t have to do it all over again.

Functionality similar to that could help immensely with exploratory testing in software. When we find an issue, we could easily go back to the last checkpoint and reproduce it and also use that same saved game later to check if the problem was fixed. This could also be used if a customer encounters a problem in production to make bug reports a lot more complete and reliable.

Implementing this feature is by no means a trivial task and might be nearly impossible to retrofit into existing systems. The reason why gaming companies can do it is that they consider saving as an integral feature of their systems from start. I have yet to try this but my gut feel is that if a system is built with this in mind, the actual overhead of doing it is minimal. Modern games have states as complicated as lots of enterprise systems, with tons of actors, their states and event information at any time. Yet they manage to load it up in a few seconds and continue from the saved state. By designing for that up front, ensuring that all actors can be persisted and loaded and that all state is easily extractable, we should be able to do the same in enterprise software as well.

The agile testing evening sessions at Skills Matter are getting better and better. I thoroughly enjoyed yesterday’s session with an experience report given by Nathan Bain and Anand Ramdeo. Anand and Nathan talked about their work at Global Radio focusing on how they implemented agile testing, and the topic turned out to be so thought-provoking that the presentation often turned into a free discussion and the event lasted twice longer than expected. In spite of that, some attendees complained that it was too short. Luckily the local pub is open till much later than Skills Matter so we continued the discussion there. Continue Reading »