Taking My Own Medicine

Recently I had the chance to apply my own templates to myself and my active project – as I had to mentor a new test manager. I was challenged in explaining how I read the upcoming IT environment project. After looking into resources for new test leads, I realized I could take my own medicine.

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A year ago, I created a new test plan format – the Situational Aware Test Plan. While mind-maps and one-page test plan canvases exist, I wanted to elaborate using the evolution principles from Wardley mapping and stop writing test plan documents.

The table structure is there to provide guard rails for the elaboration. I will use the Darlings, Pets, Cattle, and GUID -mnemonic as headlines. Our strategic decisions emerge as we use the worksheet based on the current situation and state. The strategies will be the decisions to push a field in the grid to another state. 

Delivery and Situation

	Darlings	Pets	Cattle	GUID’s
New project	Fixed date
Existing delivery speed		Scheduled Quarterly
Test Environments, internal			Repeatable
Test environments with integrations	Crafted	Some existing know-how
Environment Infrastructure			Hosted data center practices
Test data		Known but cumbersome

While this project introduces new test environments, there is an existing environment with a quarterly delivery pace. This is a classic example of the core chronic conflict of pursuing both: responding to the rapidly changing competitive landscape and providing stable, reliable, and secure services (DevOps handbook introduction xxv) as elaborated on Align your Test Strategy to your Business Strategy.

The test team allocated beside me and the new test lead is a new junior and senior tester. We are in the same team, and most are even in the same office. So collaboration will be collaborative and pervasive, with a focus on helping the new people grow.

The test team

	Darlings	Pets	Cattle	GUID’s
Test team collaboration			Growing	Pervasive
Test lead			Growing
Mentoring		Enabling
Domain know-how		Getting there

Test tools and approach

	Darlings	Pets	Cattle	GUID’s
Test activity	Explore integrations		Confirm internal requirements
Test cases			Existing can be updated.
Test case repro			Create new repository

As mentioned in the blog post about visualization, we can now use the map to discuss why we need CT and ET for the project. Based on the project’s layout, I would advise having an expert exploration of the integrations and more standard scripts for the known construction of the internal environments.