Testers the troublemakers

It’s funny, how almost everywhere developers consider testers as the troublemakers. Actually it’s not their fault, no one like to hear faults in his/her own baby. And same thing which we (tester) are doing, of course intention behind that is to deliver quality output to client. Constantly there is bitterness at some point in the game between these two roles. Wonder why? It’s the genre and responsibility of these two roles.

When bug count increases or bugs are severe and it’s causing difficulty for developer to solve that bug, developer get frustrated at the count and even at the person as well. The understanding level between these two roles conflict not only in one place but in many areas.

So how to make a good and understanding relationship between testers and developers?

My experience says that teamwork and friendship are the best solutions. If you could be a good friend of developer then you can challenge him to issues, and for sure that person take it positively and work better. It’s the responsibility of both to ensure that the ultimate output is to work at its best. While the developers should ensure that there are no bugs out of what they develop. The testers should ensure that if there are bugs, those should be given, handled at the correct time and scope, where completion comes in.

When you are a QA and working with a team for long time, the relationship between you and developers becomes friendlier. As a team you are able to work together finding defects beforehand, which is appreciated always. Not only that, sitting together in a discussion of designs and solutions can make the developers to be aware of the different issues and areas to improve quality, thus taking the quality mind-set a step further.

As a tester, you find the defects but it’s always good to share some tactics with developers on how to test the application.  Maybe, this will help the developers to test better before delivering the product. But this can work only if everyone is co-operative enough to look the final target i.e. “to deliver with quality”.

Let’s share your thoughts:

What do you think is the best way to make developer and QA relationship healthy?

Few of my thoughts on this are:
1. Share your strategy with developers. Don’t keep it in mind thinking that you will mark it as an issue at later stage.

2. Try to build friendly relations with developers, so that they can feel comfortable to share anything with you.

3. Keep your issue reporting style positive, it should not hurt someone’s feelings.

You might be a developer or QA, let’s add your thoughts in this discussion. So that our ultimate aim of “delivering quality output” will be achieved together.

About Author: This is a guest article by ‘Tejaswini patil’. She is working with an E-learning organization as an Associate Manager QA.

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Also don’t miss our another interesting read on software testing – Living Life as a Software Tester!

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What is the Best Way to Make Developer and QA Relationship Healthy?

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Many thousands of software testers I came across had the notion that they are into testing and are solely responsible for quality. Some of them even think that being a tester also empowers them as a God of Quality for the product.

The questions I ask you is: Is this for good?

Here is what I think and would like to see you considering these ideas.

Quality is everyone’s responsibility and not just a tester out there or thousands of them out there. If your family has to be happy, you can’t assign a person in your family as ensurer of happiness and catch the ensurer responsible if something goes wrong. If a family has to be happy forever, it has to happen with everyone participating and facilitating it.

Similarly, if a product must have quality, every stakeholder from customer, requirements, design, development, testing and support must have equal responsibility towards it.

However, some organizations who are not serious about testing or fake their seriousness about testing hire a tester for every project to make a tester scapegoat when any of their customers find a bug. These testers who are made to feel themselves as Quality God’s start feeling guilty about the idea of missing a bug and take responsibility for missing a bug.

This happens because most testers have a screwed up understanding of what testing is. They carry an idea of testing as improving quality while it is not improving quality but finding information about quality.

By reporting bugs – the quality by itself isn’t improving unless someone cares to fix it. Now, if you have been working as testers you would know that many times by trying to fix a bug, 2 or more new bugs are introduced. So, probably, each bug a tester reports and each bug being fixed and new springing up, the quality might be decreasing.

I must also admit that lesser bugs doesn’t necessarily mean good quality. Jerry Weinberg, a living legend of software testing who was the first person to start a testing team way back in 1960’s defines “Quality is value to some person who matters” and then Michael Bolton expanded it to “It is a testers responsibility to find out who matters and what matters to them”. So fantastic.

Here are some of the problems that happen if testers continue to think of themselves as Quality God’s

Issues with developers: Testers start seeing developers as demons who are spoiling quality and get into issues with them. This impacts the performance of the whole team and developers start disrespecting the testing community itself. So, testers who cause this problem, not only spoil their name but all our names as well.

Its like batsmen accusing of bowlers to have given a lot of runs. If a cricket team has to function well then bowlers and batsmen have to work together to make the team win. Sometimes batsmen fail to perform and other times bowlers. You may want to think of yourselves as humans just as developers and both of you are equally capable of making mistakes. However, focusing on your skills of thinking can help the team’s success.

Guilty of missing a bug: When a bug is missed, the tester feels all alone responsible for missing it. Such testers don’t think they are a part of the entire team, which missed it. I am talking about all stakeholders responsible for missing it.

If 4 runs is needed of the last ball and a batsman fails to score, is the batsman responsible for the loss of the team?

Failing to learn: A pattern among all those testers who assume themselves as God’s of quality fail to learn. The feeling of being THE PERSON RESPONSIBLE makes their mind to think they have learned almost everything and everything they have learned is right.

Let me take this open bet: 90% of the testers I have met by traveling to all places in India haven’t read a testing book yet despite several years of experience. You would hardly find a developer who has not read a development related book but testers think everything about testing online is good and fine.

This surprises me – testers don’t test their own learning. How can I believe that they can test even half as good as they claim?

The change

Now, I am not forcing you to change but let me tell you that none of the respected testers of the world have an idea about themselves as God’s of quality or being the only person responsible for quality. You may want to take a clue from it and change but it is you who is causing the change and not me.

If you are willing to change a little further, you may want to consider thinking:

- Testing as providing information about quality
- Developers as sources of information
- Test Coverage as a key factor for success of a test team
- Success of the entire team is the success of a test team
- Missing bugs is not always a tester’s fault
- Testers are humans and humans are fallible ( they fail )
- Testers are as imperfect as developers
- Helping other testers to get the ideas right after you have got it

About Author:
Pradeep is a renowned tester, thinker and thought leader and an international speaker in software testing and problem solving. He writes a popular blog Tester Tested! and tests, coaches, consults, manages testing and testers.

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Fake God of Quality versus True Humans – Who is responsible for Software Quality?

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The main concern of developer testing is – misunderstanding of requirements. If requirements are misunderstood by developer then no matter at what depth developer test the application, he will never find the error. The first place where the bug gets introduced will remain till end, as developer will see it as functionality.

Optimistic developers – Yes, I wrote the code and I am confident it’s working properly. No need to test this path, no need to test that path, as I know it’s working properly. And right here developers skip the bugs.

Developer vs Tester: Developer always wants to see his code working properly. So he will test it to check if it’s working correctly. But you know why tester will test the application? To make it fail in any way, and tester surely will test how application is not working correctly. This is the main difference in developer testing and tester testing.

Should developers test their own work?

I personally don’t mind developers testing their own code. After all it’s there baby They know their code very well. They know what are the traps in their codes. Where it can fail, where to concentrate more, which is important path of the application. Developer can do unit testing very well and can effectively identify boundary cases. (Image credit)

This is all applicable to a developer who is a good tester! But most of the developers consider testing as painful job, even they know the system well, due to their negligence they tend to skip many testing  paths, as it’s a very painful experience for them. If developers find any errors in their code in unit testing then it’s comparatively easier to fix, as the code is fresh to them, rather than getting the bug from testers after two-three days. But this only possible if the developer is interested in doing that much testing.

It’s testers responsibility to make sure each and every path is tested or not. Testers should ideally give importance to all small possible details to verify application is not breaking anywhere.

Developers, please don’t review your own code. Generally you will overlook the issues in your code. So give it to others for review.

Everyone is having specialization in particular subject. Developers generally think how to develop the application on the other hand testers think how the end user is going to use the application.

Conclusion

So in short there is no problem if developers are doing the basic unit testing and basic verification testing. Developers can test few exceptional conditions they know are critical and should not be missed. But there are some great testers out there. Through the build to test team. Don’t waste your time as well. For success of any project there should be independent testing team validating your applications. After all it’s our (testers) responsibility to make the ‘baby’ smarter!!

What you say? 

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Developers are not good testers. What you say?

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This is not the case always. Some times testers may add complications in testing process due to their unskilled way of working. In this post I have added most of the testing challenges created due to testing staff, developing staff, testing processes and wrong management decisions.

So here we go with the top challenges:

1) Testing the complete application:
Is it possible? I think impossible. There are millions of test combinations. It’s not possible to test each and every combination both in manual as well as in automation testing. If you try all these combinations you will never ship the product

2) Misunderstanding of company processes:
Some times you just don’t pay proper attention what the company-defined processes are and these are for what purposes. There are some myths in testers that they should only go with company processes even these processes are not applicable for their current testing scenario. This results in incomplete and inappropriate application testing.

3) Relationship with developers:
Big challenge. Requires very skilled tester to handle this relation positively and even by completing the work in testers way. There are simply hundreds of excuses developers or testers can make when they are not agree with some points. For this tester also requires good communication, troubleshooting and analyzing skill.

4) Regression testing:
When project goes on expanding the regression testing work simply becomes uncontrolled. Pressure to handle the current functionality changes, previous working functionality checks and bug tracking.

5) Lack of skilled testers:
I will call this as ‘wrong management decision’ while selecting or training testers for their project task in hand. These unskilled fellows may add more chaos than simplifying the testing work. This results into incomplete, insufficient and ad-hoc testing throughout the testing life cycle.

6) Testing always under time constraint:
Hey tester, we want to ship this product by this weekend, are you ready for completion? When this order comes from boss, tester simply focuses on task completion and not on the test coverage and quality of work. There is huge list of tasks that you need to complete within specified time. This includes writing, executing, automating and reviewing the test cases.

7) Which tests to execute first?
If you are facing the challenge stated in point no 6, then how will you take decision which test cases should be executed and with what priority? Which tests are important over others? This requires good experience to work under pressure.

8 ) Understanding the requirements:
Some times testers are responsible for communicating with customers for understanding the requirements. What if tester fails to understand the requirements? Will he be able to test the application properly? Definitely No! Testers require good listening and understanding capabilities.

9) Automation testing:
Many sub challenges – Should automate the testing work? Till what level automation should be done? Do you have sufficient and skilled resources for automation? Is time permissible for automating the test cases? Decision of automation or manual testing will need to address the pros and cons of each process.

10) Decision to stop the testing:
When to stop testing? Very difficult decision. Requires core judgment of testing processes and importance of each process. Also requires ‘on the fly’ decision ability.

11) One test team under multiple projects:
Challenging to keep track of each task. Communication challenges. Many times results in failure of one or both the projects.

12) Reuse of Test scripts:
Application development methods are changing rapidly, making it difficult to manage the test tools and test scripts. Test script migration or reuse is very essential but difficult task.

13) Testers focusing on finding easy bugs:
If organization is rewarding testers based on number of bugs (very bad approach to judge testers performance) then some testers only concentrate on finding easy bugs those don’t require deep understanding and testing. A hard or subtle bug remains unnoticed in such testing approach.

14) To cope with attrition:
Increasing salaries and benefits making many employees leave the company at very short career intervals. Managements are facing hard problems to cope with attrition rate. Challenges – New testers require project training from the beginning, complex projects are difficult to understand, delay in shipping date!

These are some top software testing challenges we face daily. Project success or failure depends largely on how you address these basic issues.

For further reference and detailed solutions on these challenges refer book “Surviving the Top Ten challenges of Software Testing” written by William E. Perry and Randall W. Rice.

Over to you:
Many of you are working in manual and/or automation testing field. Though I have addressed many of above challenges in our previous articles, I want your views on handling these software testing challenges.  Feel free to express your views in comment section below.

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Manual and Automation testing Challenges

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I will extract only points related to software testing. As a software tester keep in mind these simple points:

Share everything:
If you are a experienced tester on any project then help the new developers on your project. Some testers have habit to keep the known bugs hidden till they get implement in code and then they write a big defect report on that. Don’t try to only pump your bug count, share everything with developers.

Build trust:
Let the developers know any bug you found in design phase. Do not log the bug repeatedly with small variations just to pump the bug count. Build trust in developer and tester relation.

Don’t blame others:
As a tester you should not always blame developers for the bugs. Concentrate on bug, not always on pointing that bug in front of all people. Hit the bug and its cause not the developer!

Clean up your own mess:
When you finish doing any test scenario then reconfigure that machine to its original configuration. The same case applies for bug report. Write a clean effective bug report. Let the developer find it easy to repro and fix it.

Give credit to others for their work:
Do not take others credit. If you have referred any others work, immediately give credit to that person. Do not get frustrated if you not found any bug that later has been reported by client. Do work hard, use your skill.

Remember to flush
Like the toilets flush all the software’s at some point. While doing performance testing remember to flush the system cache.

Take a nap everyday:
We need time to think, get refresh or to regenerate our energy.
Some times its important to take one step back in order to get fresh insight and to find different working approach.

Always work in teams, team score are always better and powerful than individuals.

Now its time to take nap Happy Testing!

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Living life as a Software Tester!

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What are these abilities , skills which make a tester as a good tester? Well, I was reading Dave Whalen’s article “Ugly Baby Syndrome!” and found it very interesting. Dave compared software developers with the parents who deliver a baby (software) with countless efforts. Naturally the product managers, architectures, developers spent their countless time on developing application for the customer. Then they show it to us (testers) and asks: “ How is the baby (Application)? “ And testers tell them often that they have and ugly baby. (Application with Bugs!)

Testers don’t want to tell them that they have ugly baby, but unfortunately its our job. So effectively tester can convey the message to the developers without hurting them. How can be this done? Ya that is the skill of a good tester!

Here are the tips sated by Dave to handle such a delicate situation:

Be honest and Responsive:
Tell developers what are your plans to attack their application.

Be open and available:
If any dev ask you to have a look at the application developed by him before the release, then politely give feedback on it and report any extra efforts needed. Don’t log the bug’s for these notes.

Let them review your tests:
If you have designed or wrote some test cases from the requirement specifications then just show them those test cases. Let them know your stuff as you are going to critic on developers work!

Use of Bug tracker:
Some testers have habit to report each and everything publicly. This attitude hurts the developers. So if you have logged any bug then let the bug tracking system report it to respective developers and managers. Also don’t each time rely on bug tracker, talk personally to developers what you logged and why you logged?

Finally some good personal points:

Don’t take it personally:
Do the job of messenger. You could be a close target always. So build a thick skin!

Be prepared:
A good message in the end, Be prepared for everything! If worst things might not happened till now but they can happen at any moment in your career. So be ready to face them.

[Thougt of the Day: When a virtually flawless application is delivered to a customer, no one says how well tested it was. Development teams will always get the credit. However, if it is delivered with bugs, everyone will wonder who tested it! - - Dave Whalen]

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How to be a good tester?

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Unfortunately, still I find the perception of testing as a inferior role in some developers mind. This “anyone can do” attitude should be removed from those people’s mind. Lots of companies hiring “any” skilled personals to do this job and eventually suffering from the lost of money and time. Instead of hiring the junk of testers they should hire some gifted testers who can do there job beyond the developer’s limitations.

If Managers and management remove this inferiority thinking from their mind then they can hire these gifted testers in their organization. Such testers can do complex job well, can find complex bugs and further more can add some procedures to the way of doing the routine jobs in order to make it more structured.

This is what I expect in coming years; let me know your opinions.

Posted Under: Software Testing, QA skill, skilled testers, Tester vs. Developer

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Need of Skilled Testers

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