Category: QA
Influencers – James Bach
There are a number of blogs that I enjoy reading about all areas of the software development process. The software development process includes project management, business analysis, development, and testing, of course. In addition, delivering software that works requires consideration of concepts around management, sales, and business organization.
I’d like to share some of the blogs that I find influential when thinking about how to build software that works.
James Bach and Exploratory Testing
One of my favorite blogs is James Bach’s Blog. He is the creator of Rapid Software Testing. I first became interested in his blog because he wrote about exploratory testing in a way that made sense to me. I knew from experience that exploratory testing was one of the best ways to find important bugs, but I didn’t have a great way to communicate the high value of exploratory testing to teams that were focused heavily on mechanizing the testing process. James Bach has written a lot on the topic of exploratory testing. This particular post about the history of Exploratory Testing captures many of the concepts that drew me to the blog.
I particularly like the concepts of testing vs checking and the “responsible tester.”
Feedback
What do you think of James Bach’s blog and the concepts he writes about? What blogs and resources do you find particularly interesting and useful for building software that works?
The User Acceptance Testing Death Spiral
In a past role, I joined a test team that was in a User Acceptance Testing (UAT) “Death Spiral” that had caused the user base to lose confidence in the integration testing team. Based on conversations that I’ve had with others, I believe that the UAT Death Spiral is a common scenario that people encounter, and it can destroy a test team. It took some work, but we were able to pull out of the downward trajectory and regain a functional, productive partnership between the business folks and the integration testing team.
What is the User Acceptance Testing Death Spiral?
Our company had an understaffed integration testing team, aggressive deadlines, and a culture that valued meeting deadlines above all other goals. This meant that software often had known major bugs when UAT started. Even worse, there were typically areas of code that hadn’t been tested at all by the integration testing team before UAT started. It was common for the UAT team to find major, obvious bugs.
Because major bugs made it past the integration test team, the business felt a need to create a more formal, robust UAT team that would catch the numerous errors missed by the integration test team. The business folks assumed that the bugs were missed because the integration team wasn’t very good at their job.
As UAT became more robust, they realized that they needed more time to complete their testing. The company culture of tight deadlines meant that release dates could not be extended to accommodate in-depth UAT. Instead, the business insisted that the integration test cycle be shortened and that UAT start earlier.
I think you can see where this is going…
When UAT started earlier, they found even more bugs and the business lost even more confidence in the integration test team. The business then insisted on testing more of the functionality in UAT and starting UAT even earlier. This death spiral continued until the business had lost complete confidence in the integration test team. However, because the UAT team was not made up of experienced testers, the business was not finding all of the bugs either.
Basically, the integration team didn’t have time to do their job, the business was spending a huge amount of resources to test everything, even features already tested by the integration test team, and the quality of software in production was as poor as ever.
Breaking Free
Breaking free of this downward spiral was more than just a logistical problem. It was a political problem as well. The integration test team feared that the UAT team was trying to take over their jobs and the UAT team felt that the integration team wasn’t competent. Rebuilding trust was critical for any new process to be successful.
I worked with both the integration and UAT test teams to plan a new strategy. The strategy was that the integration test team would first test anything that did not have a user interface. In addition, the integration test team would write, maintain, and run automated regression tests. Basically, they would test the areas that required their expertise. Only after these areas were tested and any major bugs were fixed would the UAT team start their work. We would divide up the test cases to reduce any overlap of testing between the two teams as much as possible.
Even though the UAT team agreed that this plan made sense theoretically, they feared that removing the redundant testing would mean that bugs were missed and worried that starting UAT later would mean that they wouldn’t have time to complete their work. I convinced them to give the plan a try on a smaller project. If the advantages to the new plan didn’t materialize, it would be easier to adjust for the lost time on a small project.
Fortunately, on the small project, everything fell into place. The integration test team was able to adequately test their portion of the plan before UAT started, and the UAT team knew exactly what parts were and weren’t tested by the integration team. The UAT team had a shorter test cycle both because they didn’t run as many redundant tests and because the initial quality of code was much better. Each bug takes time to find, fix, and retest.
Best of all, the software went live and had no problems in production.
For the rest of my time with this team, we followed the new process. This resulted in higher quality code with lower cost, and it had the added benefit of greatly improving the working relationship between the two teams.
Your Experiences
I’d like to hear your experiences with User Acceptance Testing issues. Have you been in a situation where the business users lost confidence in the development team or integration test team? If so, what do you think were the root causes of the issues?
Embedded Quality – Building on a Solid Foundation
Embedded Quality is a Quality Assurance (QA) technique that I’ve introduced on many projects with great success. Embedded Quality has some of the following benefits:
- Avoids long test/fix cycles at the end of projects
- Ensures that projects finish strong
- Lowers cost
- Shortens timeline
- Improves quality
- Increases customer confidence in IT department
- Easily applied to any software development methodology
Basic Concepts
The basic concepts of Embedded Quality are nothing Earth-shattering. The concepts draw from standard software development techniques and seem like they should be common sense. However, in the 20+ years that I’ve been working in software development, I’ve found that these concepts are not commonly practiced.
QA starts on Day 1
I have found that on many projects, Quality Assurance is an after-thought. Involving QA as part of the core project team helps prevent nasty surprises at the end of the project.
QA is part of the Core Project Team
Too often, the development team and QA team are completely separate entities who send their work “over the wall” to each other. Quality and speed increase exponentially when we break down the barriers between these groups and work as a team.
QA is performed by qualified experts
One of my clients used to hire people out of high school to test their software. If they did well, they got promoted to doing phone support. Eventually, they realized that they could drastically decrease phone support and increase customer satisfaction by hiring qualified people to do their Quality Assurance work.
Just as building inspectors need special knowledge and experience to do their jobs well, software QA experts need special knowledge and experience to do their jobs well.
General User Acceptance Testing (UAT) does not begin until Core Project Team QA is complete
A common practice on projects is to rely on UAT as the only form of testing. This results in the end users seeing a large number of the flaws in the software. Invariably, I have seen the end users permanently lose confidence in the development team when using this QA strategy.
I liken this to a builder turning over a new house to a buyer without having any inspections and saying, “We don’t really know if the plumbing is solid, all the electricity works, or the roof leaks. Just try everything out and let us know what the problems are.” (In fact, this does happen: http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Consumer/story?id=2630414&page=1.)
Strong Foundation – No code is “Complete” until it is tested and works correctly
Many project schedules track code as complete when the developer completes their initial delivery. This can give a false impression of the project status.
More importantly, this ensures that new code is built on a strong foundation. When developers build new code on untested code, it is very similar to building an office tower on a foundation that has not been inspected. If a problem exists in the foundation and is not identified early, the building will fail.
http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2009/06/29/shanghai-building-collapses-nearly-intact/
Embedded Quality – Next Steps
Over the next few months, I will post tips on how to implement Embedded Quality on your next project. I’ll share stories of my experiences over the past 20+ years, and I would like to hear your experiences as well.
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