Category: Software Testing

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Agile Conferences Software Testing Technology

Tails of Fail

Today I gave a talk at TiCCA (Testing in Context Conference). The talk topic was tails of fail – how I failed a quality coach role. It’s a story of how I tried out this quality coaching thing but I didn’t pass probation. You can access the slides here. I used slido to manage the questions at the end of the sesion.

At the end of the day, quality coaching can be hard to demonstrate value add.

Will you answer all these questions offline ?

Yes, this blog post is an attempt to answer all of the unanswered questions that were raised. Thanks Richard. First of all, a bit of context that was missed in my intro. I’m currently a Test Analyst at a superannuation company, I don’t technically have coach in my title but I’m also growing my side business where I provide training and workshops for teams in testing skills. This might have caused some confusion with the questions.

What does a quality coach’s typical day look like?

When I was at Campaign Monitor, my day would start with a stand-up and seeing what items needed focus on for the day. The team might have a work item that needed a bit of testing and I’d be available to pair test with that developer if needed. Some days we would run workshops (training for quality champions; developers who wanted to improve their testing skills) or bug bashes (these were generally once a fortnight).

What are the differences between a quality coach and an agile coach and a test coach?

An agile coach is a facilitator, often scrum certified (but not always). They are usually more focused on helping the team collaborate more effectively over improving the teams quality/testing practices. I don’t see much difference between a test coach vs a quality coach. You can use the words that make sense in your context.

Are there any drawbacks to using a quality coach practice?

Yes, when you are encouraging people who prefer to build things workout their testers mindset you aren’t going to get as focused attention as someone who has spent their career practicing their testing craft.

Also, you might have some really technical testers who aren’t interested in coaching/leadership skills. You shouldn’t expect everyone to want to become a coach and that’s fine too.

What are the benefits to the organisation of the assistance/coach/advocate model?

If your company believes that quality is a team responsibility a coach can help lift the testing capabilities of a team. If you need a bit of focus on quality (maybe you have lots of customers complaining about bugs and it’s costing you big $) but you don’t know how to get your engineering teams to prioritise bug finding as well as build new features a coach could help here. There isn’t a great deal of training out there in how to be a good tester, it’s not as easy as sending your devs off to a 3 day course and bam they are master bug hunters.

If everyone is responsible for quality, is anyone really responsible for quality?

You could always say the CEO or CTO are fundamentally responsible for quality. Maybe have a Chief Quality Officer (CQO)? Maybe they’d just become a scapegoat for all of the problems you face in production? The testing teams themselves aren’t responsible for quality if they can’t easily build quality in either.

What is a good team to quality coach ratio?

Depends on the team/company. When I was at Campaign Monitor we had 2 testers to roughly 50-ish engineers. Hence why we were using the quality champion model to help get more quality reporting from teams. We physically couldn’t sit with all 6 teams at the same time to understand their pain points. I’d prefer a 1 coach to 1-2 cross functional teams. Being embedded and focused on one team of roughly 8 people would work for me.

What are the challenges you faced while quality coaching?

Clearly articulating how I add business value that aligns with my own intrinsic motivations and interests. I don’t think I’ve struggled with convincing developers they need to do more of their own testing.

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Agile Critical Thinking Mobile Testing Software Testing Technology

Visual Risk & UI Automation framework

Have you wanted to start with automation testing and not known where to begin? Or maybe you have 100’s or thousands of test cases in your current automation pipeline and you want to reduce the build times. Here I will walk you through one way you could consider slicing up this problem. Using examples from Tyro’s banking app (I use to work on their mobile iOS team).

Break into flows

Analyse your app/site/tool and brainstorm the main flows that people will take through it. I picked 6 flows using tyro as an example app. Next I numbered them.

1. Registration

Registration is a pretty common feature, you might also set a 2 factor authentication, a pin and a password for the account (especially if it’s a bank account)

2. Transfer Funds

If you have a bank account, it’s highly likely you want to access the money in it at some point

3. View Transaction

You might want to check if that bill was paid correctly or if the last transfer was processed

4. Contact Us

Something not quite right? send us a request and we will give you a phone call at a convenient time

5. Change Pin

When was the last time you changed the pin for your mobile banking app?

6. Log in

I’d say this is a pretty common feature

Mapping those flows to a risk board

Draw a graph, put frequency of use on the x axis down the bottom; things that are more used will be on the right hand side. On the vertical y axis put impact if broken. This is from a person point of view, how much would they care if that feature was a broken? From a business point of view you may have a different understanding of risk and that’s fine two. We will go into how to reflect that later.

Add your flows

We have our 6 flows to the right hand side of our graph, we’ve also broken our graph into 3 areas

Move the flows to your graph

It helps to pair on this exercise to help build up a shared understand. Do your designers and engineers have the same understanding of risk as you do? It’s ok if your answer is different to mine, we all have a different context and understanding.

Reflect other elements of risk

You might want to reflect other elements of risk such as security, financial, regulatory and anything else you can think of. At the end of the day this is only a 2 representation of risk and risk is a little more complex than these dimensions we put here.

Neat, what’s next?

If you are thinking, well that’s cool and all but what does that have to do with automation testing? Then please continue reading. You could use this board to decide which tests you should focus on building/refactoring next (hint, the stuff with 3 stars is pretty important). You could also use this to priortise your performance testing efforts. I took this board to our planning sessions to talk about new features and it helped with deciding how much automation/testing effort we may need. At the end of the day, your software will be more complex than this example.

Here is the actual board I used at Tyro with a bit more detail:

I then broke down each flow into a test case, and grouped similar test cases into a barebones automation test suite. You can also use this approach to generate exploratory testing ideas for each screen in your flow.

You can watch this talk in full here:

I also run this as a lunchtime 30-45 minute workshop exercise. Book me in for a lunchtime brownbag if you are based in Sydney (I can do remote too).

Categories
Conferences Critical Thinking Presenting Software Testing

Soap Opera Testing

What is it?

Soap Opera Testing is a dramatised method used for testing your business processes. You might want to try it for a super-condensed and thorough way of highlighting bugs. And because it’s fun. Embrace the drama.

Origins

Cem Kaner has been writting about scenario testing for a long time. He published this article on ‘an intro to scenario testing’ and Hans Buwalda presented on ‘soap opera testing’ nearly 20 years ago 😱. They’re both serious tester dudes and this stuff is legit.

How Does it Work?

You might start with a brain storming session with your sales or customer support team. Ask them for stories about things your users have done. Not just the ordinary things, but also some off-the-wall and crazy things. What you’re looking for is drama.

It might help to sketch out the story briefly. Write down steps that are essential, or those that you might make a mistake on. Cem Kaner gives some practical tips here, although you definitely don’t need to read all 500 pages.

Kaner’s Introduction to Scenario Testing is a bit more bite sized and describes the five main points your scenario needs. Namely that it’s a story, it’s credible, it will test the program in a complex way, the results are easy to evaluate and stakeholders will see the point of fixing the bugs identified.

A scenario is a hypothetical story, used to help a person think through a complex problem or system.

Cem Kaner

You then run a test exercise using the characters and scenarios from a soap opera, and analyse the results. You can do this as many times as you want, with as many different scenarios.

Use whatever soap opera you like. We make no judgements. Although fair to say that if you use A Country Practice, you’re showing your age and nobody will know what you’re talking about.

Let’s Soap Up

Here’s an example of Soap Opera Testing using The Simpsons. The program being tested is a mortgage loan application.

Let’s say Homer Simpson wins the lottery, and decides to apply for a second mortgage, for an investment property. Just as the paperwork is about to go through, Grampa Simpson burns his apartment down.

Investment property

Homer decides to help him out with the cost of a rental, meaning he needs to change the deposit he’ll pay on his investment property. Homer signs the amended paperwork but he signs it incorrectly.

Then his application is declined because even winning the lottery doesn’t give you a good credit rating overnight. The Simpsons’ next ‘diddly-door’ neighbour Ned Flanders offers to help Homer out. He’ll put in the 10% deposit.

Ned lends a helping hand

His own house is 90% paid off so it’s no big deal to him, and it will help Homer get around his bad credit rating. The Simpsons’ house is 50% paid off, and they’re putting down a 90% deposit, using Homer’s lottery winnings, and leaving some bowling money left over.

Side investment

They’re about to go to the bank and lodge the paperwork, when Homer’s half-brother Herbert Powell hears about the lottery win. Boy has he got the mother of all investment options for Homer – nuclear powered cars!

Adjust down payment

Homer can get in on the action if he puts some cash into building a prototype. So Homer has to syphon off yet more funds from the deposit he’ll make on his investment property, and change the paperwork again.

Whew, put all that through the system and see where you get to. If you think of more variables as you go, you can add them to the scenario and run the test again.

What We’ve Tested

A whole heap of stuff.

We tested rejections, with Homer’s first application, and signature recognition when he goofed up his name.

We tested multiple applications made by the same person, with an adjustment in the deposit amount made after the application had gone through.

We tested how to register multiple assets with different mortgage amounts, and a different percentage of ownership. What’s more, the owners of the properties and mortgage were not residents at the same address.

The applicants had different credit ratings, which affected the different algorithms in their application process. And they weren’t related, and didn’t intend living together at the property, which was for investment only.

Here’s a snappy list:

  • Rejections
  • Editing documents
  • Multiple applications from the same person
  • Adjusting deposits
  • Multiple assets with different mortgages
  • Different percentage ownership
  • Different credit ratings
  • Unrelated co-owners
  • Investment property applications

It only takes a little imagination to try to find many more bugs using a soap opera scenario, versus the standard “works as expected” response we’d have gotten from the test-case walk through.

Here’s a three minute recap in a lightning presentation I gave at the Selenium Conference in India.

You can access the slide deck here

have fun with Soap Opera Testing and tell me about your scenarios – add a comment below.

This article came into existence with the help of Fiona Stocker, a freelance writer and editor from the beautiful Tamar Valley in Tasmania

Visit Fiona’s website here
Categories
Agile Software Testing Technology

Becoming a Quality coach – course overview

I had the pleasure of doing Anne-Marie’s becoming a quality coach course today which was organised by Test-Ed. If you are looking to transition to a quality coach role it’s worth keeping this course on your radar. Anne-Marie is a well renowned expert in software testing and quality engineering. I had the pleasure of working for Anne-Marie at Tyro.

What is Quality Coaching?

First page of sketchnotes for the course – what is coaching?

How is a quality coaching different to a test lead? It depends on what your team wants out of a quality coach role but here is an example job description from Deputy’s principal quality coach role:

What You Will Do:

  • You will provide the guidance, inspiration and motivation for our amazing engineers to be better testers.
  • Help create a high-quality testing culture
  • Push the merits and benefits of TDD
  • Visualize testing and quality
  • Communicate with product and technical stakeholders
  • Be a customer advocate

How You Will Do It:

  • You have a combination of in-depth knowledge of Quality Assurance and Software Engineering principles and practices
  • You command the skill to communicate clearly and effectively.
  • You work directly with Engineers, Quality Coaches, Product Managers, and Discipline Heads to ensure the high quality of our software and practices.

What You Will Need:

  • 7+ years software engineering / testing experience
  • Strong understanding of QA processes and concepts.
  • Proven coaching experience in a development team with examples of how you’ve made a significant impact to their testing capabilities
  • Excellent written and verbal communication skills

Some questions you might ask?

Some people thing that coaching is all about knowing when to ask the right questions. The coaching habit by Michael Bungay Stanier would have you beleive that all you need to coach someone is 7 questions.

  • What’s on your mind?
  • And what else? (repeated a few times)
  • What’s the real challenge here for you?
  • What do you want?
  • How can I help? or What do you want from me?
  • If you say yes to this, what must you say no to?
  • What was most useful or most valuable here for you?

I think is only applies to one on one coaching, it doesn’t scale well to coaching a small team of developers and it definitely doesn’t scale to giving a lecture to 100’s of people or online. I think a good teacher is a good coach and also knows when someone needs a bit of mentoring too instead.

Models for Coaching

We discussed 2 different models you can use for coaching. Goal and ADKAR. We also discussed what does quality mean to us and expanded on a few definitions.

What does ADKAR stand for?

  1. Awareness: Leading people to see the need for change.
  2. Desire: Instilling the desire for change.
  3. Knowledge: Providing employees with the information or skills they need to achieve change.
  4. Ability: Applying knowledge and skills to bring about change.
  5. Reinforcement: Making sure that people continue to use the new methods.

We also briefly discussed Kent Beck’s talk on 3X (Explore, Expand & Extract.

Sketchnotes from Kent Beck’s 3X talk

Coaching Software Testing

Test leads will need a bunch of skillsets to do well in coaching. We also used role play to practice our newly developed coaching skills.

Running Software Testing Workshops

When running a coaching session there could be a bunch of behaviours you come across in your testers or developers that are mental barriers to trying something new. Your developers might say:

  • Testing isn’t my responsibility
  • I don’t have time for testing
  • Testing is boring
  • What if I miss a bug?
  • All testing should be automated

You testers might respond with mindsets like:

  • If I help developers do their testing, how will I prove my value?
  • I’m not technical, I can’t help with code reviews
  • I might loose my job if I raise bugs earlier
  • 100% coverage is achievable

Summary

It was a good day of engaged learning. I’m not really working in a context where I can put a lot of these coaching methods into practice though. How would you come up with antidotes to these mindset problems in your team?

Categories
Marketing Meetup Software Testing

Orders of Communication

Have you ever wanted to ask a large group of people their thoughts on a particular topic? Maybe you want to know what the 2000+ members of the Sydney Testers meetup group want to get out of the group? Was your first thought to create a poll or send out a survey? I bet you that channel didn’t work out so well for you because I tried it.

Here is my list of orders of communication to help you get the results you need when trying to get data to help influence your decisions.

Face to Face

Nothing beats face to face communication. The only draw back with this method is it’s hard to scale to reach a mass market. However the best way to get lots of feedback in a face to face style would be to collect opinions at a physical event. The low-tech solution here would be to hand out a paper survey at a meetup event and collect the results as people leave. BOOM, 30-120 responses based on attendance and it’s all useful data that’s not from some random scrub off the internet. There’s a little bit of manual data entry at the end but the results justify the return on investment.

You see this method play out at conferences for lead generation. A company will have a stall displaying their products and services. They might tempt people in with a competition or survey. “Give us your email for your chance to win” type of deal. This is leveraging face to face communication.

Do you want to settle a deal or convince your boss to give you a raise? Have a face to face meeting in a cosy cafe. It helps build up that environment of trust.

Video or Phone call

If you can’t meet someone in person, arranging a phone call or video chat should be your next point of call. As a millennial I’ve had a mild social phobia of talking on the phone that I’ve had to overcome. I highly recommend getting comfortable with getting on the phone. It will really help with collaborating with any task. As our workforce gets more global this will become more of the way we get work done.

Direct Message

I created this survey for gathering feedback from Sydney testers members last year. However I’ve only received 41 responses so far. I’ve done some pretty thorough marketing for this survey and the results just don’t justify the effort. I did:

  • Sent an email through the MeetUp app asking for feedback
  • Created a discussion on meetup asking for feedback
  • Asked every tester in Sydney who’s a level 1 connection on my LinkedIn to provide feedback via personal direct messages
  • Asked the committee to share the survey
  • Ask every new Tester who I connect with on LinkedIn to provide feedback

The feedback has been really useful but it’s been a lot of work. Work that I’m not getting paid to do either. So I don’t see it as a useful use of my time.

Social Media

Social Media is the ultimate spray and prey method. You put stuff on the internet hoping for people to stumble upon it and react to it. Posting just once hardly is effective. You need to be consistent with this and constantly posting. This is also a lot of work.

For example we’ve had this poll on our Sydney Testers meetup page since 2014, yet we only have 20 responses.

Most of the results so far are around job opportunities, networking, learning tech skills and remaining relevant in my career. If you run a tech meetup, your members probably want very similar things.

Conclusion

I prefer face to face communication above all others. I think meetup sucks as a platform for trying to engage people outside of the “turn up to this event” type of engagement. Do you dis-agree with what I’ve put here? How so?

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Conferences Job hunting Software Testing Technology

Next Career move

I recently asked myself, “where would I like to take my career?”. This is a blog post on that reflection. From maintaining tech skills to improving my coaching. Here are the things that are important to me.

Keeping tech skills up to date

I’ve been doing software testing now for over 7 years and even though I come from a Computer Science and Engineering background, I’m finding people too easily put me in the box of “non technical manual tester” based on my previous roles. If I do not work hard at maintaining my tech credibility I see a risk that I will be stuck with the “non technical” label for the foreseeable future. So how am I maintaining this skill? I’m working towards the following:

  • working towards a certified ethical hacker
  • Building a mobile app as a side project
  • Attending developer focused conferences

Certified Ethical Hacker

I’m working through Troy Hunt’s and Dale Meredith’s, certified ethical hacking course on Pluralsight. I find security testing more interesting than automation testing and there’s a huge demand for technical cyber security skills. The course is hard to do, there’s 80 hours worth of lecture material and it requires a commitment to regular learning to maintain it.

Wearable app side project

I’ve already spoken at conferences about my example poo tracking wearable app to talk about ideas like privacy by design. I haven’t even built the app yet and I’m using it to teach people. I’m interested in teaching myself mobile app development and how to build basic API’s. I even have someone who’s offered to help build this. Eventually I’d like to use this app to help teach people about different elements of testing.

Attending developer conferences

I’ve always enjoyed attending dev focused conferences. I always learn more compared to software testing focused conferences because it is out of my domain of expertise. I will continue to prioritise these conferences over software testing conferences this year.

Any new role that I start has to help me with maintaining my tech skills first and foremost. This is number one priority I will look at when assessing new roles.

Improve my Teaching/Coaching

I have always loved teaching. I was the kid in school that all my friends asked for help with maths questions. I’ve been tutoring my peers for as long as I remember. I’ve had my tutoring side business for almost as long as I’ve been testing. If teaching wasn’t see as a bit of a dead end low respected job, I would have studied it at uni. I do this stuff for free, that’s how much I love doing this. Being a Quality Coach at Campaign Monitor showed me that there is demand for people to teach software testing skills. In a few years I’d love to be running my company where teaching technical testing skills is my focus. I’ve been running robotics workshops for kids since my uni days. Any job that allows me to practice on the company dollar is a plus in my mind.

Speaking at Conferences

I’ve spoken at 14 tech conferences in the last 3 years. I enjoy getting up on stage. Any role that encourages me to do more of this is awesome in my books. It relates to the enjoying teaching, however getting up on stage is a little different to tutoring/coaching a person one on one. There is an element of entertainment with getting up on stage. The putting on a persona and pretending to be something more that what you feel inside.

All the data

In all of my previous roles, I’ve always enjoyed doing a deep dive into data analytics. From creating dashboard for event tracking testing to helping product understand how our customers were using our apps. I enjoy it all. I’m considering doing a Masters in Statistics in a few years when I’m more on top of my finances.

A bit of job stability

I went through the motions of job hunting 3 times last year. I do not want to do this again and again. Also meeting new people is mentally draining. A bit of stability with my work environment would be awesome. Or at least some having planned turbulence. I hadn’t had much luck with full time positions last year. Maybe this year I do all contracting? I’m still considering full time though.

Have a good culture

I care deeply about having a good social connection with the team I’m working with. I need to feel like I can bring an authentic version of myself to work. That means being vulnerable enough to talk about my struggles with depression and to be comfortable bring my quirkiness to work. It comes down to psychological safety.

Reasonable salary

I’m not solely motivated by money but having a consistent budget compared to my previous role is important for my financial security. I do feel like I’m getting at the expensive end for being a software tester and I can’t even compete with off shore testers in regard to pricing.

Practising a bit of sales and marketing

I struggle with selling testing as a craft where you want skilled people doing it for you. I’m glad I’ve never had to pitch my skills to CEO’s before getting hired as a tester. Someone else has already been convinced of the value testers bring. However with shrinking test teams I think the testers that will thrive in the future will have their pitch just perfect. Any testers who knows how they add value to others and remains relevant probably won’t struggle as much as those testers who don’t. I’m practising marketing through things like my blog and running Sydney Testers. Getting up on stage is related to marketing too. I’m also going to right a book this year as a marketing exercise.

I’m not interested in

Management; this feels like a clear way to let you tech skills go rusty and it’s becoming harder for managers to promote themselves as relevant in today’s agile/self driving teams.

Having QA in my title and working in a role that is only “Automation” testing; I find a lot of companies are demanding QA automation skills but don’t seem to understand the value a skilled tester can bring to the role or company. QA often stands for quality assurance, however building automation doesn’t assure quality, it helps the engineering team deliver code with higher confidence. To me QA stands for Quality Advocate. I can’t assure quality. You will find I never call myself QA anything in all of my online profiles.

It’s rare that I find someone who can clearly articulate why they want automation in a way that drives me towards it. I’ll happily collaborate with an Engineering team to help build this however I have a tendancy to get distracted by all of the other fascinating elements of quality. Like accessibility or security.

I’d prefer to call myself a Software Engineer in Test who is focusing on helping developers own and improve their own quality processes. There shouldn’t be a difference between Software Engineers and Testers in today’s agile teams. We are all working towards building quality products.

Summary

I’ve come to believe that my next ideal role is some kind of developer advocate role. Tech will be the focus, but that blend of marketing, community engagement, technical writing and speaking at conferences is appealing to me. Ideally I’d like to have a Mobile Software Engineer in Test role to help me move towards my coaching/teaching goals and to help me keep up to date with mobile technology.

What are you looking for in your career? Do you have a career coach to help you move in the right direction?

Categories
Meetup Software Testing Technology

Sydney Testers for 2019

Thank you to every one who’s been involved with Sydney Testers. What a year it’s been for meetup groups. In this blog I’m going to look ahead to reflect on what we could achieve for 2019 but first here’s a recap of what we’ve done for Sydney Testers in 2018;

  • 13 meetup events
  • 7 dice game sessions
  • 5 social events
  • 4 testing in the pub discussion groups
  • 4 CV clinic sessions
  • 2 Lean Coffees
  • 2 Cross promotional events
  • 1 Webinar
  • 1 Workshop

1 main meetup each month

We will continue to aim for 1 big meetup event a month. I’m going to experiment with more discussion groups and more 3 x 20 minute talks per 1 meetup to help keep things fresh. Do you have a 20 minute talk proposal? Submit your proposal here.

Getting more people involved

I’d love to see things like the discussion groups, dice game sessions and lean coffees run in other parts of Sydney. These event don’t take much to organise and don’t require a budget because they are often “pay your own way”. I can mentor anyone in how to run these events too. I’d love to see some of these events in Parramatta, Macquarie and North Sydney. You don’t need to run these events every month. Once every 2-3 months would be fine. If you are interested, reach out to me via sam@thebughunter.com.au .

Money

See this blog about Sydney Testers and money, we hope to raise more funds for events and to continue paying for incidentals (like meetup fees). Feel like sponsoring or hosting an event? Please reach out to me.

Leadership

At some point I will naturally step down from leading Sydney Testers. I might do this in 2020. Do you want to help out? I can help mentor anyone in how to run events for Sydney Testers if you are interested. We may even have an election at the end of 2019 to elect new members?

Feedback

Please fill in this survey if you’d like to help drive the future of Sydney Testers. We really appreciate any feedback you may have.

Categories
Job hunting Software Testing Technology

Back on the job market (again)

It’s only the third time this year I find myself job hunting (again). It was only back in June I found myself going through a break up from Campaign Monitor and in July I was starting a new role with a start up called Insight Timer that built a meditation app. I was just made redundant on Monday. I guess that’s #StartUpLife for you. Software Testers are expensive. I’m still fascinated that the CTO managed to convince the team they needed a software tester in the first place, even if it was just for 5 months. Redundancy is just another day in tech right?

I still want to do testing

This time last year I was thinking about becoming an Android Developer or a Product Manager. It seemed like the only way to progress my testing career was with Automation Testing or Management and I was not looking forward to any of those options. Over this year I have rediscovered my passion for testing and teaching. I want to combine the two. In a few years time I want to be running my own company where the focus is teaching testing skills. I’m not there yet but I’ve now got something I want to work towards. I’ll be looking for a position that has some strategic alignment with this goal. You can access an updated CV in PDF format here or as a Google Doc here. I’m hands on and very technical when it comes to my testing.

Goals

The goals I’ve set myself for next year do align with working towards my own company. I’d like to launch a wearable app, help my Nan with her digital marketing and continue to look after my health. You can read more about at at this blog post for my 2019 goals. Maybe I should add a goal, “Keep a job for 12 months?” 😭

Categories
Mobile Testing Software Testing Technology

Setting up a homemade charging station

At Insight Timer we’ve just ordered a whole bunch of refurbished second hand android phones from Green Gadgets Australia for testing our Android app. We managed to get 9 devices for under $2K and it also gave as a pretty good manufacturer spread from Samsung to Google. This blog is how I went about building a home made charging station for these phones.

First, finding and ordering the phones

 

look – shiny, the makings of a mobile device farm

Keeping all of these phones charged

The two tablets came in large boxes. I decided I wanted to convert one of those boxes into a charging station. All of the phones had bits of foam that were used to hold the phones in place. I cut up these pieces of foam and hot glued them into the box. I used the left over phone boxes to store extra cables.

However, I forgot to counter for actually plugging the USB’s into something. Next on the order list was a bunch of USB charging stations, extra cables and cable ties. All ordered via MWave.

Charging Station 2nd iteration 

After the USB charging stations, cables and 2 more phones from a Chinese supplier turned up I got to work on organising cables. We now have an Xaomi and a Lenovo in our device list.

 

I even have all of the cable types segregated, so there’s spaces to charge some of the test iPhones we have floating around too.

Conclusion

I’m quite pleased with our spread of devices and the budget of this set up. These devices aren’t exactly the highest end phones today but it’s a good thing our developers love to have the latest and greatest tech toys so they already have the high end covered. I might add one or two more phones that represent tiny screens. Have you built your own device farm before? How’d you keep all of the phones charged?

Categories
Conferences Presenting Software Testing Technology

Australian Testing Days – Sydney Conference Overview

I had a blast at Australian Testing Days Conference in Sydney on Friday. It’s always good to get reconnected with some colleagues and to make new connections. First up we had Jennie Naylor go over how to use OKR’s to drive the Quality Onwership:

Using OKR's to grow quality ownership - sketchnotes

The OKR (Objectives and Key Results) framework has been in use since the 70’s and is used by companies such as Google, Uber and Facebook to set their organisational goals. OKR is a framework that can be used at any level within your organisation. This presentation mention how to use OKRs to help improve quality and ownership in a team.

Key Takeaways

The key takeways I got from this talk was how to use OKRs to determine if experiments are successful or not and getting the whole team involved in quality and product ownership.

AI and the impact on QA

Given by Chhavi Raj Dosaj who proposed the question, can AI can the landscape of testing?  Chhavi had a big topic to fill. I think his main point was a little lost because he spent too much time going over the basics and he wasn’t able provide compelling examples of where AI could benefit the QA process.

One of his examples was using an unsupervised learning algorithm to select the top manual test cases to execute in the next testing cycle based on past performance of said test cases. Anyone who primarily uses test cases to manage their testing work and reporting is using a pretty dated testing practice that doesn’t scale or make sense in the Agile world. You can read more about my thoughts on the end of manual testing. I also wish he asked me for feedback on his slide design before he got up on stage. There were some presentation sins committed in his slide deck.

dev Ops Testing Strategy

DevOps Testing strategy by Amit Kulkarni fell victim to the old bait and switch presentation sin. The title didn’t match up to the content. My key take away from this talk was, “there are tons of tools out there you can use in a continuous testing way”. There wasn’t any DevOps in this talk at all. 

Performance Testing in CI

Andrey Pokhilko gave an engaging talk on Performance Testing in CI using opensource tools. I learnt the name of a new tool; Taurus. Which can be used on top of JMetre and is a little easier to use than the good old JMetre.

State of BDD

As I’ve already done Gojko Adzic’s spec by example workshop offered through YOW! a few years ago, I already had a decent idea where this talk would go. Bria Grangard was engaging and gave a good update on the state of this field.

Transforming Testing

Bruce McLeod gave an engaging talk in business strategy and how it will transform testing. This was one of my highlights of the conference. Bruce goes over how testing needs to change from a culture of “protection” to a culture of experimentation using the Netflix chaos monkey as an example.