Innovation in Testing

Let’s look at testing and test management as something you can build expertise in, thus it can be placed in various places on a wardley map. Similarly innovation activities in the field of testing can be modelled by “Pioneers, Settlers, Town Planners” [also originally swardley, article by Itamar Goldminz].

The model has three types of talent: those that experiment, those that build products and those that optimize the products/commodity. Shortly put:

Simple illustration of the Pioneers, Settlers & Town Planners Model.

Each group innovates, but there is also an built-in drive from experiment to product, to optimal commodity and back again as components to experiment on. As stated in the original article (from 2015) all three kinds are brilliant people. We can relate the model both to what value the customer looks for and what kind of activity the organization strives for. We can apply it for the broader testing field as not all testing is pure play experiments and not all testing is a commodity.

PST by @swardley

Examples of Pioneer experiments could be all the fuzz around RPA, AI and ML.. and square lashings on the System Under Test – on the technology side. On the practise side, it could be emerging practices of how to test in the space of infrastructure or IT service transition. It’s the “Pippi Longstocking” of – “I have never done that before, so I probably can“.

The settler activities are all about taking the emerging practises mature them and make them repeatable. Shortcutting the time to learn something or repeat some novel practise in a new setting. Some examples could be: A Practical Guide to Testing in DevOps, the shifts of testing (at their time of writing) as ways to codify emerging practices.

Example: In 2018 I did management of testing of a large enterprise IT transition of 700 servers, running 100+ applications – it was a novel first time, so we put together some testing practices that seemed to work (for that context). In 2019 I’m doing a similar transition of similar size, where we try to repeat the practices and approaches.

The brilliant quest of the settlers is to take ideas and built innovative and established solutions for the broader audience. Most settlers are probably framework (and content) creators .. not framework maintainers.

As soon as a practise has been established it’s up to the Town Planners to maintain and optimize the practices. To me, examples in this space includes:

• Using Selenium to test web applications with
• Using BDD/Gherkins for collaboration
• Using agile practices and embed testing in the agile teams
• … following the ISTQB cook book

You mind find it harsh that I group all of those practices together. To me, they are so established by now that they can be purchased. It’s a commodity market and it’s frowned upon if you don’t use it. But still – innovation happens and town planners do a brilliant job. It’s about faster, better, smarter – and especially about building more effective teams.

Also the Town Planners build the components that the Pioneers stand upon for their next novel idea. One example could be that to test web applications with code-less test an RDA tool utilizes the Selenium framework.