#270 – But what if we can’t release often?

With digital solutions there is a ongoing urge to release often. A quest for feature toggles and continuous deliveries of new features and fixes. Automation of tedious tasks do help to drive consistent deliveries and aids in driving high-performing teams. There is good research to support that.

Recently I have worked on a solution, where the system had only to work for a month each year – and be closed down the other months. Some solutions I have similarly looked at, have years between being active. We can’t wait to ship features in the next release – the system has to be at 100% features that specific month.

Examples of business situations and domains:

• Performances, like Eurovision
• Sport events, like the Olympics
• Elections
• Black friday, Christmas shopping?

How do you test when you can only perform the act once – and if it fails it will have serious consequences? You practise and rehearse until it becomes safely repeatable. You have stage-moms and support teams to train with you.

Let’s look at the ultimate example: rock-climbing with no rope. How do you test for climbing up Yosemite’s El Capitan 3000 feet / 900 meters?

Photo by Tobias Aeppli on Pexels.com

The accomplishment is more preparation than performance. Honnold climbed El Capitan roughly 50 times in the decade before his free soloing of the rock formation on July 3, 2017. While he is famous for the ridiculously fast 3-hour, 56-minute ascent, 99% of Honnold’s time on the wall was spent roped up, practicing the route. Knowing where and how to move was the culmination of hundreds of hours on that granite in advance.

The Seven Lessons From ‘Free Solo’ On Working Without A Rope

Besides the scaling of the IT infrastructure for peak load – the test strategy has to consider the fact that the event itself will be a one-off, where there show must go on – and there’s no fallback, only fall forward.

There’s a huge difference between continuously delivering web features every day in a business to consumer setting, as compared to one-off projects of migration legacy platforms. This is why my approach to creating situational aware test plans starts with looking at delivery speed:

Rare	Regular	Often	Pervasive
One-off	Quarterly	Weekly	So often you dont notice

A scale of delivery speed

In one of the projects I looked had we had extensive user rehearsals and dress rehearsals. Well, they are called something more IT fancy. But at the end of the day it was about training to make the performance muscle knowledge in the people performing the event. Much like the training Honnold did.

Lastly, my experience is that you get more organizational traction by aligning with goals rather than risks and issues. It’s a behavioral trick simply to talk about the thing you want to give attention. And at the end of the day the CEO wants to talk about goals rather than risks. She rather wants a successful performance with a few flaws that an delay due to bruised hands (and egos) during waxing on and waxing off.

#268 – Who Brings in New Knowledge?

Well, if you are reading this – there’s a good chance it’s you. Especially if you read this with the intention of sharing this with your team. I hope you do, obviously 😊. But perhaps it’s unclear whose responsibility it is, to bring new knowledge to the team. Is it always the team manager job – or is it a dedicated person that by role, or by habit, that bring in new knowledge?

Photo by William Fortunato on Pexels.com

#267 – Reminder – it’s about Story Shaping

In agile delivery teams, it’s recommended that stories and features are discussed before being developed. A checklist called “Definition of Ready” can be used as a reminder to check that the delivery team has everything needed to prepare the delivery of the feature. A key ingredient is a shared understanding of how to confirm the delivery – for the whole team.

Story shaping requires at least three people to get together. They are not amigos nor amigas. They are often three, sometimes two people, and often more. They represent the different viewpoints needed to deliver: builders mindset, testing mindset, security mindset, operations mindset, business mindset, etc.

No one person can hold all these viewpoints – at least a builders mindset and a requester/business mindset is needed.

If you skip doing story shaping your acceptance criteria and testing activities will be misaligned. And you will either have overdone the effort needed or underestimated the challenges of the story.

One customer, three people to do the story shaping

#264 – Create Situational Aware Test Plans

From the endless discussions on the proper content and contexts of a test plan, it’s apparently still needed – but what goes in it? Let’s create situational aware test plans inspired by Wardley Mapping.

ISTQB template-based test plan documents are in my personal opinion no longer industry best practice. First of all it’s bloatware. While they intend to be a springboard into considering what is relevant we have ended up with 8 page templates – where every single of the 20 topics are required information. While it looks dazzling – it’s like frosting puffed with empty calories.

What most people delivering effectively software are using is 1) modern test automation and 2) modern test case management tools to lead and manage the test activities. And there is clear research on what 24 factors correlates to high-performing teams. It seems to me the templates have been frozen stale since 2012 – and are hindering us more than helping.

#263: There is a Model for your Trouble

Often directors, managers and other decision makers talks about an advanced challenge they have: What can we automate, who should automate and what tools to pick. There more and more I listen, the more I hear – they have not applied any models of the problem at hand. And there usually is a model of the problem space already. Any old model is preferable over no model at all. But it can be hard to see in the middle of chaos.

Hunches and Hard Truths

Recently I was in a network call on the use of automation and machine learning in detection of skin issues (EDB 5.0 in Danish only). Similarly I was reading about automation in the legal space. Both these stories align with the struggles we see in the discussions around how much we can automate. We can model it on this simple continuum between hunches and hard truths:

Focus on Goals over Risks

Looking into the discussion on what goes into a Test Plan and what goes into a Test Strategy – it’s my personal opinion that we can improve our business alignment. Risk-based testing and Product Risk Analysis have been around for long – but better models have emerged to address what will be more impactful.

Stop Writing Overdone Test Plans

While I have previously talked about writing down expectations and alignments – I would much prefer a more lean and up-to-date approach to test plan documents. Looking at what we know now, an separate test is more of a sign of missing trust between parties than a collaborative value add for the business needs.

A More Advisory Role

Over the last year I have looking to work myself out of the test manager role and into a more advisory role. And by April 2021 I was given the formal title change from Senior Test Manager to Senior Advisory Consultant.

I have had the title “Test manager” probably since 2008, so it’s been a while. In the companies, where I have been employed, the Test manager title has never been with line management (hire/fire). Rather it has been similar to a project manager, with a focus on the testing deliveries of a project, release or program.

I will still be leading test activities, but my role for the future will be more about enabling someone else doing the testing or someone else having a testing problem to solve. There are plenty of test activities done by people in non-testing roles – it’s the activity that matters.

Darlings, Pets, Cattle and GUID’s

Kill your darlings and treat your tests more like cattle than pets, are among some of the heuristics currently around for managing your environments and automation test suites. These heuristics tells me that the environments and automation are in a state of product or even commodity, while previously the tests and environments where like darlings and pets – named and nurtured.