Tag Archives: software testing

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October 27, 2011

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Where are the technically inclined testers?

–Edit–

This would have been better had it been called something towards “Where are the technically curious testers” as Anna Baik pointed out. The wording is not perfect.

//Edit//

Over the years I have worked with a whole range of testers, both functional and technical, who have shown different levels of comfort with the technology under test. Some were good, some were great and others I simply never want to work with ever again. The latter ones, to me, are a problem we are currently facing in software testing. There seem to be too many software testers with a lack of understanding how software is actually built, how the internals of a program work.

I have never understood how one can be working in technology, or to be more specific in information technology and not have at least a base grip on how things you are supposed to test work? Even when you are purely focussed on functional testing, I really do not understand how you can not grasp the basics this entire industry is based on.

How come that even now, when it is becoming more and more clear that software testing is an important specialisation within the IT industry we still see a lot of testers with no technical knowledge what so ever in this industry? I realize that historically there was the idea that “anyone can be a software tester”.  I am just not convinced that statement still holds true.

Take for example a building inspector, that is also a tester of sorts, no? He verifies whether all the rules have been followed of proper architecture, the design has been implemented as promised etc. Imagine you are having your own house constructed and this building inspector comes by. You put your hopes on this person to validate that your house is what you want it to be: warm, safe and as you requested.

This building inspector, upon arriving, grabs his excel sheet with the requirements for the house and checks the ones he can verify, without needing any knowledge of architecture or constructing a house for that matter. He then gives you this checklist and tells you he has functionally covered all things of your house.

Considering that you live in an area with lots of snowfall in winter you ask this person whether the roof can manage with a load of snow on it in winter and the heating will not collapse under the strain of having to heat the entire house in a snow-storm.

He says: I don’t know, I am not an architect nor a construction worker, I am merely the building inspector. I just go through this list of things I need to check, why would I know anything about building a roof for a house or what the heating can take? You should probably ask the construction workers what they think.

Would this give you faith in his verdict that the house is indeed what you wanted?

I believe not, yet this is a practice that i see happening fairly often in software testing. So where does it still go wrong in software testing? How come there is still this tendency to believe there is no need for understanding software when you test it?

How often do you see the same bug coming by when testing an application, once you see a bug more than once, in a very similar form, you should be able to come up with the idea that there might be an underlying issue going on. Instead what I  often see is that for every occurrence a new bug is created in the bugtracker. To understand that there quite likely is one underlying problem, the tester doesn’t need to know how to program, you should however have a basic idea of how a program is (or should be) built up and if you are not certain whether it indeed might be one and the same issue in the code, how about talking to the developer?

When exchanging ideas and thoughts with other testers on twitter and forums etc I quite often see an amazing lack of knowledge in this area. To make things even worse, a fair share of testers seems to have a degree (bachelor or master) in computer science yet have no clue what, for example, a regular expression is. Is it just me, or is this indeed a worrying thing? When reading through the Computer Science curriculum of an average university here in the Netherlands, I do see all kinds of interesting subjects and descriptions that would lead me to believe basic programming is part of what you get taught, however when talking to the graduates that end up in software testing I see nothing of that knowledge.

Where are the technically strong testers? The ones that can have a discussion with developers about how the structure of a program was setup, who can tell a developer that the SQL query he wrote is extremely inefficient? I know I see some of them online, these are the testers I enjoy following on twitter and on blogs, but there must be more than these happy and noisy few. Where are they hiding? In my experience there are not enough of them, at least not in the Netherlands.

— Edit–

There is a nice article dealing with similar questions and frustrations on testnieuws.nl: http://www.testnieuws.nl/2011/06/06/tester-praat-ook-eens-met-een-ontwikkelaar/ (sorry, it is in Dutch, if you do want to attempt have a look at the google-translated version)

 

–Edit 03/11/2011 —

Really nice to read Elisabeth Hendrikson’s article on a similar subject, but from a different point of view: http://testobsessed.com/blog/2010/10/20/testers-code/

I am sad to see though that there are people commenting on her article and are calling QTP and especially Selenium basically record/playback tools. If you have ever used either you know that QTP is a hell of a lot more than just record playback and Selenium is clearly NOT a record playback tool (unless you mean the Selenium IDE rather than the entire toolset of Selenium.

 

 

 

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October 24, 2011

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Educational reflections of a fairly successful tester

Experience in any field comes through learning and perfecting the skills and knowledge you apply in many different areas. Working in the software testing industry has taught me a lot, over the years I have gained quite some programming skills, analytic skills, people management skills, learned a lot about all the different testing theories, read a boat load of books about testing, programming, test automation and quality assurance, heard a lot of people speak about it and gained quite a broad general knowledge of testing, or so I hope. All of this knowledge I apply, fairly successfully, on a daily basis in my job.
So what would it take for me to go from fairly successful to very successful? Do I need to gain some more specific knowledge? If so what exactly?

I love learning new things overall and related to my job in particular, i enjoy studying to get new ideas and get my mind challenged making space for the most unexpected and fresh approaches, perceptions and solutions.

Working for Polteq gives me an advantage of my employer providing quite a lot of trainings I can sign up for. Unfortunately when going over that list there is not all that much I would want to study at this point. I have studied books on TMap and ISTQB, ITIL, Prince, TQM and many other subjects, why would I now all of a sudden need to do courses in it?
Agreed, it might give me some new ideas, but it will not really challenge my mind I believe, especially since the courses are mainly oriented towards gaining certification in these subjects.

A while ago I needed to hand in an overview of my “educational needs” to my manager in order for the company to see how many people have desires in a similar direction and thus which courses they can arrange with a fair sized group. My answer to this request went something like this:

I feel a need in further education, however, at the moment I have no clear ideas in which direction I would want / need this education to be.

I am inclined however to say that my education should be oriented more towards gaining skills, both testing skills and softskills, given the frame of work I am being inspired by at the moment. This will help ensure moving test automation within Polteq and the testing community to the next level, the thing that i am aiming to in my professional life at the moment.

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October 12, 2011

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Getting a junior up to speed on test automation with FitNesse

Last week we had the privilege of having a junior test engineer working with us for a few days to see what it would take to get him fully up and running with test automation as we have implemented it at our customer.

Our intern, as I introduced him at our client, has a solid eduction in Civil Engineering and lacked any kind of knowledge of test automation or writing software. He has just finished his first project as a junior tester, which was testing a data warehouse migration.

Motivation

What drove us to try this was simple: curiosity and questioning of my personal coaching and explaining skills. Thus far I have had the feeling that I somewhat failed in showing how easy the setup of FitNesse with our custom fixture is to anyone who is not part of a management group. With this engineer I wanted to confirm whether this was me not explaining things clearly or people not following what I explained properly (e.g. me explaining things in the wrong wording).

Starting point

Our “intern”, as said, has little or no hard IT knowledge. He is one of the junior test engineers that came out of the group of trainees Polteq Test Services hired at the beginning of the year. With his degree in civil engineering he is for sure a smart guy, but considering he has never been on the construction side of software, he had some ways to go.

Considering that he had no prior knowledge of either the FitNesse/WebDriver setup nor the environment we are working on, we started with a morning session of explaining and overflowing him with information by answering the following questions.

  • What do the applications under test do?
  • What is the service oriented architecture underneath?
  • How does this all tie together into what you see when you start using the applications?
  • What is FitNesse?
  • What is WebDriver?
  • How do these two work together?
  • What is the architecture of the Fixture?
  • What is a fixture and how does that relate to WebDriver and FitNesse?

After this session he was set to work with FitNesse. The main thing that slowed him down somewhat was the getting used to the syntax as we force it through the use of our custom Slim fixture. At this point he still had only a minor base knowledge of what the application under test does or is supposed to do. Based on the existing functional testcases he managed to fairly rapidly automate a set of testcases, or more specifically, transform them from base functional descriptions into Slim tables which will run successfully as a test.

The result

Writing the testcases was easy work for him, he picked up the base syntax really fast and managed to pump out some 15 working tests in a very short period. It was time for a bit of a challenge.

Considering he had never written a line of code in his life I thought we might as well check to see how fast he would pick up writing a simple wrapper in C# around an Advanced Search page, which includes a set of dropdowns, textfields, radiobuttons and checkboxes which can be manipulated along with a submit and reset button.

The first two methods we wrote out together, him typing while I was explaining what is what. Why do you want the method to be public, why does it need to be a bool, what are arguments and how do you deal with that in FitNesse.  Where do you find the Identifier of the object you are trying to get the wrapper around, what do you do when there is no ID, how do you extract the xpath and make that work well. Once we got through the first few methods I set him at work to figure it out for himself.

The first question I received after a while was: ok, so now I’m done writing these things out in code, then what? How can I now see this working in FitNesse? After making an extremely feeble attempt at explaining what compiling is and deciding to just show where the compile button is, he then set to work to verify in FitNesse that his code indeed is capable of reaching and manipulating every element on the search page and getting to a sensible search result.

Take away

What did I learn in this week? For starters that when coached close enough it is very simple to get someone without experience up and running with FitNesse the way we set it up, which is good to have confirmed again, since that was the aim.

Another thing we have seen proven is that adding new methods to the fixture is dead-simple, changing the ID’s of objects on the pages should not lead to too much hassle maintaining the fixture. For the Base class quite some developer knowledge is still required, but once that part is standing expanding the testable part can be done with some of coaching. So technically we would need to start handing over maintenance of our Base classes to someone within Development and hand off maintaining the rest of the fixture to someone within the test teams here.

One of the things we might consider in making maintenance easier could be to split the leaf-nodes, e.g. the page level, off from the base and helper classes in order for these two to be complete independent of one another, which means that the developer can add and refactor in the base, without breaking the current functionality, once done refactoring or adding stuff, the new DLL can be used to talk to.

Maybe I am getting carried away with making things modular now though…

Overall, good to see our idea of making things easy to transfer indeed seem to work well, although I do not want to say that this one week was enough to hand over everything of course!

Based on this week I have started to explain things to the test team internally, which does seem to indeed be an improvement. I do believe that having this week gave me a chance to play around with the ways in which I explain stuff, especially on a non-technical level.

Erwin, thanks for being here and listening to my explanations, following instructions and asking questions! It was a joy working with you this week.

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September 23, 2011

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Anything can be a testtool

Last night we had a meeting at Polteq where Test tooling was at the center of attention. Interestingly most participants consider test tooling immediately to be related to test automation, I think that with a little creative thinking most testers can get a lot more out of tools than just mere test automation. I see tools as just about anything I use in my work as a tester to get my work done. This may be an application like notepad++ to keep track of what I have done or quickly find and replace a word or phrase in several places;  Selenium WebDriver to remove a lot of repetitive work in testing; Excel to create data which can be inserted into DB directly from excel.

One of the things that I realized over the course of the conversation is that, not only are there a lot of different ideas on what tools might be, but there is also confusion about how to use tools.

I have always tried to be creative in my use of tools, in other words, abuse a tool, apparently not everyone thinks like that.

An idea was posed that we compile a list of tools and in what situations these tools can be used, which is an interesting idea, I am just not convinced this is the right approach. A list of tools can of course come in extremely handy, but will we be able to come up with a more useful or complete list than for example on opensourcetesting.org ? Plus, will this stimulate those testers that think tools are directly related to test automation to go look at the list? I am not sure.

I therefore proposed to come up with a list, of 10 or so, tools that are either by default installed on a Windows PC  or are easy to find and download and give some ideas of how you can make these tools work for you in a slightly unorthodox way.

While writing this post I realized how difficult it is to just think up ideas how to (mis)use tools. Generally my ideas for how to make life easier while testing come to me kind of naturally. For example when doing a major refactoring in FitNesse of the testcases, we tried at first to use the Refactor functionality within FitNesse.

This is a fairly simple regular expression find/replace. Works well enough when you do not really care what you are replacing. However when you need to know what you are replacing this refactor function is not good enough, it doesn’t give you any control since it just goes off and does the replace.

What we needed was a slightly more sophisticated way of doing the search and replace. That is where Notepad++ came knocking. This basic text editor is capable of searching within multiple files in a set of directories and showing you the results for this search, it is also capable of replacing all occurrences of these keywords in one big bang, while still showing you what it is doing.

When kicking off our current project, we needed some way to quickly build a hierarchical overview of the applications under test. We first thought of using the sitemap xml, importing that into Excel and using that. This would however, not give us the opportunity to play with it and use it as an inspiration to base the custom fixture on. We ended up using an extremely easy way to build a hierarchical overview, where all nodes can be moved, linked, collapsed and expanded at will: a mind mapping tool. We used Freemind, it is a wonderful little tool, easy to use and free to download!

There probably are an unfathomable amount of other tools that can be abused in this way.  Please share them with me!

Tools are there to do stuff for you, to make life easier. Nobody is stopping you from abusing a tool to your advantage!

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September 21, 2011

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Are we building shelf-ware or a useful test automation tool?

Frustration and astonishment inspired this post. There currently is a big regression testing cycle going on within the organization, over the past 4 months we have worked hard with testers to establish a sizable base of automated tests, however the moment regression started everyone seemed to drop the automation tools and revert back into what they have always done: open excel and check the check-boxes of the scripted tests.

Considering that we have already setup a solid base with a custom fixture enabling the tests, or checks if you will, to do exactly what the tester wants them to do and do what a tester would do manually whilst following the prescribed scripts, and having written out, in FitNesse, a fair share of these prescribed scripts, what is stopping them from using this setup?

Are we automating for the sake of automating?

While working on this, extremely flexible, setup with FitNesse and Selenium WebDriver and White as the drivers I have started wondering more and more why we are automating in this organization. The people responsible for testing do not seem to be picking up on the concept of test automation, they are all stating loudly that it is needed and that it is great that we are doing it, but when regression starts they immediately go back to manual checks. I say manual checks on purpose since the majority of testing here is done fully scripted, most of these scripts do not leave anything to the testers imagination, resulting in these tests being checks rather than tests. Checks we can execute automatically, repeatedly and consistently with tools such as FitNesse.

How do you make testers aware that a lot of the scripted tests should not be done manually?

Let me be clear on this, I am a firm believer in both manual and automated testing. They both have their value and should be used together, automated testing is not here to take away the manual testing, rather it is here to support the testers in their work. Automated testing should be complimentary to manual testing. Thus far in this organization, I have seen manual testing happening and I have seen (and experienced) a lot of effort being put into writing out the automated tests in FitNesse. However there has not been a clear cooperation between the two, despite the people writing the automated tests being the same individuals who also are responsible for executing the manual tests (which they have rewritten into FitNesse in order to build automated tests).

We have tried coaching on the job, we have tried dojos, but alas, I still see a hell of a lot of manual checks happening instead of FitNesse doing these checks for them. What is it that makes people not realize the potential of an automation tool? Thus far I have come up with several possible causes

  • In our test-dojos we mainly focused on how to write tests in FitNesse rather than focusing on what you can achieve with test automation. This has led me to the idea that we rapidly need to organize another workshop or dojo in which the focus should be on what the advantages of automated tests are.
  • Another reason could be that test automation was not initiated by this team, it was put upon this team as a responsibility. The team we are currently creating this fixture for is a typical end-of-the-line-bottom-of-the-testing-chain team, everything they get to test is thrown over a wall and left to them to see if it works appropriately. Most of them do not seem to have consciously chosen to be testers, instead they have accidentally rolled into the software testing field. Some of them have adapted very well to this and clearly show affinity and aptitude for testing, others however would, in my opinion, be better of choosing a different occupation. It is exactly the latter group that needs to be pulling this test automation effort currently going on.
There are more reasons I could go into here, but I believe these two to be the main issues at hand here which can actually be addressed.

So what will make people use automation tools properly?

The moment I can answer this one in a general rule-of-thumb I will sell it to the highest bidder. For within this organization however there doesn’t really seem to be a simple solution just yet. As I have written before, there is not yet one sole ambassador for test automation in this organisation. Even if there is, we will need to cause a shift in the general mindset of the testers. Rather than just walking through their predefined set of instructions in excel, they need to consider for themselves what has already gotten covered in the automated tests, how can I supplement these tests with manual testing?

We will need to find a way to get the testers to step out of their comfort-zone and learn how to utilize tools other than Excel and MS Word. Maybe organizing a testing competition will work, see who can cover the most tests in the shortest time and with the highest accuracy?

I am not a great believer in measuring things in testing, but maybe inventing some nice measurements will help the testers see the light. For example “How often can you test the same flow with different input in a certain timeframe?”.

Did we build shelf-ware or did we add value to the testing chain?

At the moment I often ask myself whether I am building shelf-ware or actually am building a useful automation tool (trying to stay away from terms like framework, since that might only increase the distance between the tool and the testers). Whenever I play around with the FitNesse/WebDriver/White setup we currently have running I see an incredibly versatile test automation tool which can be used to make life a lot easier for those who have to test the software regularly and repeatedly (not just testers, but also developers, product owners etc. can easily use this setup).

It is completely environment agnostic, if needed we can (and have in the past) run the same tests we run in a test environment also in production. It is easy to build new test cases/scripts or scenarios (I seem to have lost track what would be the safe option here to choose, they all have their own subconscious connotations) since it is a wiki. All tests are human readable, if you can read an excel sheet, reading the tests in FitNesse with Slim the way we built it, should be child-play.

Despite all these great advantages, the people that should be using it are not.

Reading all this back makes me consider one more thing; we started off building this setup with these tools based on a request from higher management. The tool selection was done by the managers (or team leads if you will) and not by the team themselves. Did we miss out on the one thing the IT industry has taught us? Did we build something we all want, but not what our customer wants and needs? I hope not, for one thing, I am quite sure this is what they need, an easy to use tool to automate all tedious, repetitive check work.

Question that remains: is this what our customer, or to be more exact, our customers’ end user, the tester, wants?