10 Things About Testing That Should Die

I've taken some heat for discussing the whole "is test dead" concept due to a feeling that I was validating the concept of testing being unnecessary. Allow me to clarify my position. I do not believe, for one heartbeat, that testing as an activity is in any way unnecessary. I do believe that there are things related to the current state of and common beliefs about testing that should die. With that said...

Scott Barber's Top 10 Things About Testing That Should Die: 

10. Egocentricity

Face reality testers, neither the product nor the business revolve around you. Think about it. No business, no product, no developers => no need for testers. In fact, if developers wrote perfect code, there'd be no need for you. You are a service provider and your primary clients are the managers, developers, and/or executives. Your secondary clients are product users and investors. So stop whining and stomping your feet when your clients don't make decisions you like with the information you provide. It's not your call. If you want it to be your call, get on track to become a project manager, product manager, or executive, otherwise, get right with the fact that you provide a service (hopefully a valuable one) and get back to providing it.

Please, no new "certifications"

I just saw an advertisement for this Building a Certification Testing Program - Cutting through the hype to see how it really works on LinkedIn, and I couldn't stop myself from adding the following comment:

Please make it stop. We don't need more "certification" programs -- not unless you are going to be the first organization that allows itself to be held legally and financially accountable when people you "certify" can't do what you "certified" they can.

Otherwise, conduct all the training you want. Assess student performance if you want. Only "pass" students who "pass" the assessment if you want.

Just do us all a favor and *STOP* calling it certification until you are willing to do things like:

• reimburse hiring expenses to employers who hire folks you certified as being able to X who can't X
• implement periodic re-assessment to enforce some bar of continued knowledge/skill/ability over time
• implement some way to revoke certifications of folks who fail to demonstrate knowledge/skill/ability in the workforce

The list goes on, but I know it's pointless. The certification machine will continue no matter how loudly, or how frequently I point out the ways in which it is frequently (at least arguably) unethical and fraudulent - at least in "testerland."

Seriously, this drives me insane.  Others can make stands about content, assessment methods, etc. -- I have my opinions on those things, but honestly that part of the topic bores me.  People decide what university to attend, what to major in, what electives to take, etc. for their degree programs ... they can decide on whether or not the content of some professional development program (with or without "certification" program) is worth their effort.  What I want to see is the "certifying bodies" being held accountable for complying with the claims they make about the individuals they "certify."

I mean, seriously, have any of you seen any data that you'd consider either statistically significant, empirical (vs. anecdotal), or free enough from obvious experimental design flaws to support the claims we see from "certifying bodies"?  If you have, please share the data with me and I'll list it in line -- unless of course, it's flawed, in which case, I'd be happy to point out how and why the data doesn't support the conclusion.

Otherwise, please, please, please don't engage in creating more of these things.  Please.

--
Scott Barber
Chief Technologist, PerfTestPlus, Inc.
About.me

Co-Author, Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications
Author, Web Load Testing for Dummies
Contributing Author, Beautiful Testing, and How To Reduce the Cost of Testing

"If you can see it in your mind...
     you will find it in your life."

STP Online Summit: Achieving Business Value with Test Automation

Due to the overwhelming success and positive reviews of the last STP Online Summit: Business Value of Performance Testing, we've decided to do it again -- only this time, we're going to explore Achieving Business Value with Test Automation.

Join me (while I continue practicing my radio host skills for my emergency back-up career as a sportscaster) and 7 other presenters that I consider to be elite practitioners, teachers, and thinkers in their test automation areas of specialization for 3 half days online to learn their tips and methods for achieving business value with test automation. If you or your organization are using, or thinking about using, automation to enhance or improve your testing, you're not going to want to miss this online summit. I honestly can't think of anywhere else you can get this concentration of relevant and thematically targeted information at a better price, but you be the judge:

When: Tuesday October 11 10:00AM - Thursday October 13 1:30PM PST

Cost: $195 USD before 9/26/11 $245 USD after 9/26/11

Theme: For more than 15 years organizations have been investing in the promise of better, cheaper, and faster testing through automation. While some companies have achieved demonstrable business value from their forays into test automation, many others have experienced questionable to negative returns on their investments. Join your host, Scott Barber, for this three day online summit, to hear how seven recognized leaders in test automation have achieved real business value by implementing a variety of automation flavors and styles for their employers and clients. Learn how to answer the ROI question by focusing on business value instead of testing tasks, and how to implement automation in ways that deliver that value to the business, not just to the development and/or test team.

Scott Barber Interviewed by Matt Heusser; Podcast

Two part podcast on the STP site. I say some interesting stuff... or at least I say some stuff that's interesting to me. :)

Twist #52 - With Scott Barber

Twist #53 - The Return of the Barber
 
--
Scott Barber
Chief Technologist, PerfTestPlus, Inc.
About.me

Co-Author, Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications
Author, Web Load Testing for Dummies
Contributing Author, Beautiful Testing, and How To Reduce the Cost of Testing

"If you can see it in your mind...
     you will find it in your life."

CloudTest Lite - A Game Changer in the Performance Tool Market

Yesterday, SOASTA announced their new product, CloudTest Lite (Press Release). It's not common that I get excited about a tool product release, but this is different. This product has the potential to change the market for the better.
Scratch that. I'll be shocked if it doesn't change the market for the better.

Why is that, you ask? Consider the following attributes of CloutTest Lite:

• It's a fully featured, easy to learn and use, enterprise class, modern, performance testing tool for web & mobile applications
• All you need to use it is a reasonably modern machine connected to the internet and a web browser.
  • You don't need to buy, install, configure or maintain load generation machines.
  • The "license" is tied to your personal credentials, so you can design, create, execute, and analyze your tests from any machine you want without needing to figure out how to point to the license server, or how to get onto the corporate network from your favorite internet cafe.
  • You can even do much of the design, test enhancement, and analysis entirely off-line.
• You can simulate up to 100 virtual users any time you want. No more scheduling time on the controller days or weeks in advance guessing the app will be ready for your test. No more having to wait until your next scheduled time to re-run your test when you see something 'wonky' in your data.
• It's free.
  • Yes, I said free.
  • As in, you never need to pay a dime. Not today, not when the trial expires, not a year from now to continue your maintenance contract.
  • That's right, it is free from now until the sun explodes (or at least until well beyond when anything we're building or planning to build today is long gone and forgotten)

Imagine the implications:

Uruguay surpasses world with professional development program for software testers.

The Centro de Ensayos de Software (CES), a non-profit software testing laboratory in Uruguay, has recently launched a program that is certain to become the new “gold standard” in professional development for software testers.  The program, endorsed by the Universidad de la Republica (Uruguay), the Universidad Castilla La Mancha (Spain), and sanctioned by the Uruguayan IT Chamber (CUTI), is the most comprehensive, affordable, and publicly available training program for software testers on the market.  Based on my market research and comprehensive review of the program, I have no reservation in rating it as market leading.

Software Testing, the software development activity responsible for identifying issues with software and providing a wide variety of quality-related information to stakeholders and decision-makers prior to release, is the primary job of many millions world-wide, yet the majority of software testers learn their craft entirely on the job.  Yes, there are various “take a class or two, pass an information-based (not a skill-based) test, and receive a certification” programs – some more respectable than others and most far more expensive than the CES program.  There is even a new certificate coming to market that involves three, one month, on-line courses where students are taught and assessed by experienced testers and university professors, but none of those rise to the level of the CES’s program.

Latest Column -- Testing training: Disturbing behaviors of students

My latest column...

Drive-by training. Never heard of it? It is exactly what it sounds like. You drive to a training facility (or an instructor drives to you), for a day or three the instructor delivers the pre-packaged training class, then everyone drives back home. It's not the best training model ever invented. There is generally no student assessment, and the only instructor/course provider accountability is reputation. Even so, many good ideas can be shared and lots of students come away feeling that it was well worth "the drive."

As it turns out, I've been delivering a lot of drive-by training to software testers this fall. That in itself isn't particularly noteworthy -- end-of-the-budget year is a popular time for drive-by training -- but something that is noteworthy is that I have noticed a rise in some disturbing behaviors among the individuals and organizations that select and attend drive-by training.
At first, I thought it was just me. But after an informal poll (and some lively discussions) with my employees and trainer friends in the testing realm, I became increasingly convinced that the behaviors I'm noticing are not exclusive to me and that I'm not the only one who thinks they are on the rise.

Read the rest of the column.
 
--
Scott Barber
Chief Technologist, PerfTestPlus, Inc.
About.me

Co-Author, Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications
Author, Web Load Testing for Dummies
Contributing Author, Beautiful Testing, and How To Reduce the Cost of Testing

"If you can see it in your mind...
     you will find it in your life."

Latest Column -- Inspired by taking AST's Bug Advocacy Class

I recently completed (successfully, I might add) the second of the Association for Software Testing's all online, free to members Black Box Software Testing course. Each of these courses is four weeks in length. I've been involved with this program since years before it became a program, and I am an instructor for the first course in the series, called Foundations. For this course, called Bug Advocacy, I was a student.

Bug Advocacy focuses on the skills and concepts needed to compose high-quality, easily understood, appropriately compelling and well organized defect reports. I know, it sounds pretty boring to me too, but it was anything but boring. These classes are designed so that you watch recorded lectures (in this class the lecturer is Cem Kaner), answer some quiz questions (to make sure you watched the lectures), participate in class discussions, do both individual and group projects (in this class the project centered around evaluating and enhancing unconfirmed OpenOffice bug reports), peer reviewing one another's assignments, and taking a far-from-trivial closed-book essay exam. All in all, I spent about 40 hours participating in the class over the four week period.

This approach isn't just about writing a good bug report, it's about making sure you do the right testing after you find a bug.
There was one idea in particular from the class that I found absolutely brilliant and wanted to share with you. Below is actually a very lightly edited version of my answer to one of the exam questions asking us to describe a six-factor approach to bug reporting that Cem remembers using the mnemonic "RIMGEA." If you are a regular reader of mine, you know that I have a fondness for mnemonic devices, but that's not what I thought was so great about the approach. What I think is brilliant is that this approach isn't just about writing a good bug report, it's also about making sure you do the right testing after you find a bug to enable you to write a good bug report. Take a look -- you'll see what I mean.

Click here to read the rest of the column

Click here for more information about AST's free-for-members, online training
 
--
Scott Barber
Chief Technologist, PerfTestPlus, Inc.
About.me

Co-Author, Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications
Author, Web Load Testing for Dummies
Contributing Author, Beautiful Testing, and How To Reduce the Cost of Testing

"If you can see it in your mind...
     you will find it in your life."