Sep 01

What Type of Test Manager Am I?

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A few weeks ago I was in a discussion with my peers and somebody asked me “hey, what type of manager are you?”. I thought about the question for a brief second and replied “I’m a manager who takes care of his people”. Now this was a very high level answer, with many facets to it.

The People

I take care of the people on my team. I listen to them, speak with them, understand their goals, objectives, and challenges, and help them achieve and overcome them.

I also stand up for the people on my team. I back them up and they know they have my support in matters where they need me. I put them in a position and situations where they can succeed.

One of the most important lessons I learned very early on in my career from my friend and very first mentors Tim Voet, is that when things get ugly, leaders protect their team from having to deal with it when they shouldn’t have to, and when praise and glory comes along, they make sure the team gets it and receives that recognition. This is something I make sure I always do.

The Team

I like to hire good, passionate, people with a positive and good attitude. People who want to learn and be part of something great. That goes a long way. I spend a lot of time with my team, coaching, and providing many of the hands on test training sessions that I teach. These are highly participatory sessions and everyone gets involved and comfortable working with each other, learning from one another, and working well in a team while exchanging test design concepts and ideas.

I teach many different skills, strategies, techniques, design mechanisms, and coach my team on how to apply them in their context.

The Practice

I’m a highly skilled context-driven test professional that has built test practices from the ground up, and help evolve test teams to be effective and provide value in innovative and highly functioning project teams. Every company is different, business goals are different, teams are different, every project is different, every software solution is different. Context matters!

Leading and Managing

I lead and coach the people on my team. I manage the test practice. Skilled software test professionals are smart, intelligent, and extremely capable people. I help people who aren’t fully there yet, get there. I help test teams be fully functioning members of software development teams. I work at companies to manage and build their test practices to add value and help improve the software solutions they deliver.

I work hard, behave and act in an ethical and truthful manner at all times. I communicate clearly and respectfully. I pride myself on professionalism and lead by example.

That’s the type of manager I am.

Jul 22

Stand Behind Your Products And Services

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I’ve been in the software business for 15 years. One of the things I’m most proud of is that I’ve always given every single project I’ve worked on my absolute best, most focused effort. I’m proud that I’m able to stand behind the work I do.

The best organizations I’ve worked at stand behind their products and services. The best people I’ve worked with, stand behind the quality of the work they put forth. People who care about their craft, like myself, always want to put forth the best work they can given the situation.

In software, we want our clients to be happy, and beyond satisfied with the solutions we deliver to them. I find that in the software world, this is more important than ever. There are so many products, services, and competitors out there, it’s that much more important for organizations to put forth their best work, and deliver the best solutions they can for their clients, and then stand behind those solutions.

As a consumer, I purchase things like most people do. I highly respect the shops that stand behind their products, the people and companies that stand behind the services they offer. These are the shops, people, and companies that I remember, like, and will purchase from again. I’ll recommend to friends, family, and neighbours and write great reviews for.

Making a sale is just the beginning, delivering a top notch quality product and/or service and being proud of it, and standing behind it – thats the win.

Jul 07

What Software Testing Training Should I do?

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What software testing training should I do? It’s a question I’ve been asked many times. My answer? It depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. What your goals are. This wasn’t always my answer. My answer used to be a list of highly recommended (by me), challenging, practical, hands-on training courses designed to take you to the next level. But not anymore.

So why’d I change my answer? Well, for a few reasons. For one, not everybody gets super charged up hearing that type of thing, it can be intimidating. Some may immediately believe that they don’t have that type of time or energy on top of work, life, family, and other commitments to take on training courses of this nature. Others may be pressured to obtain a particular type of certification. So I went back and thought about it and revised my answer.

So what’s my answer? It depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. Sometimes companies, management, influential stakeholders in the company start rewarding or preferring certain types of software trainings like certifications. Somebody in this situation may need to take a training to keep their job, or to continue evolving in the company because those with influence are looking for a certain paper that says a person is qualified to do a job (even though they may not be). For this person, there’s a certain goal attached to the type of software training they are looking at completing.

However, if you’re looking for a software training course to make you a better software tester and to build up your skills, I recommend highly participatory, practical training courses that require you to work on solving problems and doing actual work related to the training, over those coures built on theory alone. This is how people learn, by applying what they’re learning to different contexts, including their own. I’ve seen way too many software testers who’ve taken theory based courses, have passed multiple choice exams, and who have certifications, not being able to apply what they’ve learned to real world software situations. The theory based courses have taught them one way, and one way only of how a concept applies – a best case, perfect scenario. Real world situations are far from perfect and differ in so many different ways. So even having one or two variables changed in the real world situation will stump these testers. They’ll try to apply something that turns out to irrelevant because they haven’t really learned how to use the concept.

If you’re looking at software testing training courses to make you a better tester, to evolve your skills, and take you to the next level, look for practical courses that teach you and require you to do the work and use the concepts, strategies, and techniques as part of the course. There are a few I can recommend that I won’t list here, but you can contact me and I’d be glad to refer them to you.

Remember, the more skills you have, the further you’ll be able to go, and the more valuable you’ll be.

Dec 20

Be The Driving Force

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It’s been two years since I’ve last written. That’s a long time! Time flies as they say. Things are good, both on the personal end of things and the professional end of things too. I’ve been busy producing great work, living, exploring, learning, enjoying time with the family. Spending time the way it should be spent.

The lack of posts definitely doesn’t mean I don’t have lots of share and write about – because I do. I’ve been keeping notes about topics I want to write about, so I will post about those topics sometime. Maybe even sometime soon.

In the beautiful world of software, I see a lot of people be placed in charge of huge projects and initiatives and I see so many of them not have the impact they should have had. They lack the fuel, the passion, the fire. The person heading up the initiative just doesn’t have the driving force to produce the fuel, the passion, the fire that these initiatives deeply need. They’re in it, but they’re not. You may recognize what I mean by this. They’re in it, but they don’t want to get their hands too dirty – maybe just a little bit. They kind of want to get things started and rolling, but then might expect other people tasked to help on the initiative to get their hands dirty, while their’s are clean. People are smart (not everybody, but we should give credit where it’s due). They pick up on these things.

Initiatives work and have powerful impact when the person heading up the initiative is not just willing, but is actually getting their hands dirty. Is out there getting things rolling, being involved, and getting things done well. People can sense that. They see it. They feel it. It serves as a great motivator for everybody tasked on the initiative. It sets an example. It sets the tone.

If you want an initiative that you’re in charge of to be great, to have a real impact, to have life and soul, and make a difference, first and foremost you have to be the driving force behind it. I’ve seen these things fail many times. I’ve seen them realize great success other times. There are many reasons behind the end result. One of them is how much of a driving force the person in charge of the initiative is. Obviously there are many facets around being a productive and influential driving force – but that’s not what I’m covering in this post.

There are often huge budgets set out for these initiatives. They’re needed business-wise for many different reasons. If you find yourself put in charge of something like this, bring your A game. You’ll be remembered for it. Do something great and leave your footprint behind. Be the driving force.

Dec 30

Twenty Seventeen – Year In Review

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It’s that time of year again – when I sit down, think back, and write about the year that’s coming to an end and look towards the year that’s about to begin. Twenty Seventeen was an interesting year to say the least, with both good and not so good times like most years, but the good absolutely outshines the not so good. The things I’ve learned, the application of that learning, professional & personal growth, personal health & fitness all continued to improve this year.

New Technology

This year, my team and I started working on and testing the company’s VR projects! It was a fun and exciting time for both the team and the company. To kick off the year, I spent time researching VR – the applications out there, the technology, the development platforms, the capabilities, the equipment, and what people in VR were writing and blogging about.  This, combined with examining each specific project’s context, helped us come up with an effective test approach for our VR projects. For the first retail VR project of the year, we presented our test approach and objectives to the project management and stakeholders, worked very closely with the project manager, our developers, and the UX team. So much of retail VR is visual and performance related, and a lot of it boils down to having a good user experience. We learned a lot working side by side with the UX team and our developers during our pair testing sessions – lessons that we took into account testing other VR applications during the year.

While VR is a different technology compared to the other types of software systems we test – there are aspects, test-wise that remain intact (we are looking for important quality related information about the VR application), there are also differences (how we are going to get that information). That being said, and something most skilled tester’s already know – every software system, and the situation surrounding the project is different, which impacts (or should) the approach to testing it.

We got more familiar with Unity, we were able to check out code and test difference branches as needed. The VR applications we tested were all developed for the HTC Vive, and a few for the Samsung Gear VR.

One of our VR projects ended up winning an award. You can read more about that here.

Building up my team

I hired another software tester to the team. Both myself and the VP of Technology were looking for something specific – a skilled tester with critical thinking skills, good technical skills, with a great attitude (amongst other things). After numerous interviews – we found the person!

We work in a very fast-paced environment, often with very little or no documents outlining specifications and requirements. We often need to go and seek out that information, assess priorities and risks with the PM’s, design effect tests, and carry out our tests. I am working with project management to test early and often, as part of development.

For us to be able to do good work, and good testing in our agency setting, I do different types of trainings with my team. Things ranging from mind map training, exploratory testing, test prioritization, risk assessment, test coverage, bug reporting, test reporting to name a few.

I also like to help each individual on my team improve. Every individual is different in the way they learn, in the way they like feedback to improve, how they improve, and what their goals are. I work with my team to help them improve in the areas that are important for our team to provide great service + area’s that are important to them. I think about and work with the team to help them achieve their goals. It requires creativity, and thought, but it’s fun and I get to learn a lot!

Personal health and fitness

I started biking/cycling again three years ago. This year I took it to a whole new level – I cycled for a total of 623 KMs this year! My longest rides were a 60KM ride and a 50KM ride – plus tons of other shorter distance rides. Many times during the summer, I cycled to and from work. I absolutely love cycling and it’s done wonders for my cardio and overall fitness.

I’ve also continued working out at the gym. My workout’s changed a bit this year, with more focus on cardio as well as core strengthening exercises. There are a lot of difficult and extremely challenging exercises that do not require weights which made me much stronger.

I also picked up swimming this year. I thought my cardio was great with all the cycling I did, but swimming is a entirely different type of cardio. I had a lot of fun with it.

I played badminton this year for the first time since my college days. It was still very fun and yes I am still very competitive (just ask my wife 🙂 )

BBST Bug Advocacy

I successfully completed the BBST Foundations 2.0 course a few years ago and have been looking at taking the BBST Bug Advocacy course for the past two years but with the course only being offered twice a year, the timing never worked out with some personal events and engagements on my end. Well, that’s about to change because I’ve registered for the course in 2018! I am looking forward to this and have been for quite some time now.

Gearing up for Twenty Eighteen

As this year comes to a close, I am looking towards next year. As mentioned, BBST Bug Advocacy is high on my list of things to look forward to in the upcoming year. I’ve started taking a look at Richard Bradshaw’s course on programming, java, and selenium this year and look forward to completing it in Twenty Eighteen.

A few days from now, on January 4th I’ve enrolled in a webinar by Cem Kaner: An Introduction to Domain Testing. I find myself curious to learn more about the course and domain testing.

I look forward to continuing to build up our test team at work, with new people, new trainings, new projects, and doing even more exceptional work. We have some new thing’s we’ll be implementing this upcoming year which I will be blogging about.

I really enjoy reading books and although I did read a few this year,  I’d like to get in more books in the upcoming year. There are a lot of books on my list on both the software front and the self improvement front that I will be reading.

I will be continuing having fun cycling, swimming, working out, and some badminton.

Last but not least, I look forward to continuing my journey exploring & travelling, enjoying great conversation & delicious food with the wife, great friends and family, and spending time enjoying life!

Dec 12

Our VR project won an award

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I had the opportunity to work on a very fun, and engaging retail VR project at Valtech Canada this year, the retail VR software application for Decathlon. The version we worked on this year is the second version of the application.

The Decathlon VR application recently won an award at the 2017 Boomerang show held in Montreal, Quebec, Canada – The Grand Prix for Interactive Retail Environment for our Decathlon Virtual Reality “Camp de Base”.

You can find more information about the show here, and the article about the award we won over here.

It was a proud moment for our team, to be recognized for our great work on this application.

As the test lead on this project, I worked on the application from the very start, understanding the context and then building a test approach suitable for this type of application and with the client’s objectives for this solution in mind. My responsibility also extended to hands-on test design and testing with the team.  The timeline for delivery was extremely aggressive, but we had a great team in place, from my test team, the developers, the UX team, the project manager, and every single person that worked with us to help deliver this application.

The Decathlon VR application allows users to gear up with the technology of the HTC Vive to view and interact in a 3D world and compare tents, prices, items in three different camping environments and different weather conditions. It’s currently deployed in 14 stores, 3 countries, and 6 languages.

Nov 08

Adding good testers is a start but there’s a lot more

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There are many factors that go into the quality of what you end up delivering to your customers. Good testing (and making informed decisions from it) is just one of them. The members on the team, the commitment to do great work, the environment for people to do top notch work, the architecture the system is built on, the development, the project management, the decision making, communication, collaboration, system testability, the situation you put your team in to succeed (or not succeed) – the list can go on and on.

Adding good software test people to your team is a great start if you’re looking to improve the testing on your team, within your company, and are interested in having your software development teams deliver great work. However, it doesn’t automatically improve your quality or testing situation.

Good testers, just like the other people on your team and in your company, need to be put in situations where they can do great work, and succeed. One of the many things a good tester will do and understands is that time and budget is always limited, but the amount of things to test isn’t. They will focus on doing the best testing, the most important testing possible in the time available, in the current situation, and present their stakeholders with a report about their testing which will include problems, risk factors, and information about the test coverage (among other things) so that the decision makers can make well informed decisions.

But when you find yourself constantly saying “we don’t have the time to test much” or “we don’t have the budget to go that deep into testing”, what you’re really saying is “we don’t have the time or budget to properly evaluate our product” which is a quote I got from Michael Bolton. When you ask your testers to just quickly check that something is working, just to confirm that a function works as it’s supposed to and go no further – it’s important to understand that there isn’t much value to that – and most good testers will tell you that.

Having good software test people on your team is a great start, but it’s not automatically going to improve the testing being done. You need to put testers in a situation where they can do great work and help the team deliver great products. Avoid restricting them in ways that impact the value of what they’re actually delivering to you in terms of information about the quality of the product under test. Don’t falsely convince yourself that just because there was some testing done, it was enough, or that it was good, or that it automatically increased the quality of what you’re going to deliver.

“It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” – Steve Jobs

 

Oct 04

Document complex test setup information

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Testing systems which require complex and time consuming setup on the backend, initializing parameters, setting system conditions and flags, and using test tools can be challenging and fun, but often as testers we usually have a lot to cover and want to spend the majority of our time testing – which is what we should be doing.

Often in the chaos, we’re learning how and where to set up variables, conditions, flags, tools etc. to enable us to test our conditions and scenarios and observe what’s happening with the software we’re testing, while recording the results of our tests. During all of this, we often forgot to document and take note of the specific and complex setup required to test.

Sure we may remember how to set things up tomorrow, or the day after, but chances are, with the amount of things we’re testing, and the different types of test’s we’re doing, we wont remember them for long.

It may seem like there’s just not enough time to document complex test setup information, but taking some time to do so in whichever medium your project, team, or company uses, will save you and others on your team a lot of time and effort when it’s time to revisit the features. Take those fifteen minutes, you’ll be glad you did.

Jan 31

Team Workshops

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During the past few years, I’ve organized, held, and participated in quite a few test team workshops to help build and evolve test skills and practices with the different teams I’ve been a part of.

When putting together a workshop, I like to consider my audience, their familiarity is on the topic, how I’ll present the topic, how I’ll engage the participants, how it can help them, and what I’d like the team to take away from the workshop. Taking the aforementioned into consideration, I’ll start putting the workshop together.

I am an advocate of highly participatory workshops where everybody is actively involved and where we all learn from each other. I believe it’s people’s interest, curiously, and their own test and project situations that often brings forth the most intriguing questions, thoughts, and comments – all which fuel the energy in the room.

Learning

I believe there’s a lot of learning that can be had listening to presentations and talks from some people. Some of these people deliver information so well, you’re often at the edge of your seat. The things you can learn from listening to a talk can go a long way.

I also believe that a great way to learn test skills in a workshop setting is by actually applying and practicing the skill as part of the workshop, with the rest of the team and participating. It’s a great way to learn, to brainstorm with others, to practice, to put your ideas into your work and then build on them while learning from others. In short, we’re learning by actually doing.

Sharing

I also enjoy having everybody, or every team share the results of their respective tasks during the workshop. It gives everybody a chance to show what they’ve done, how, what thought process they used and for them to explain it and allow their peers to ask questions. It enables their peers to learn alternative ways, or additional ways a task could have been approached, and build on what they’ve put together.

Enjoying

What’s the point of taking time away during a busy work day to attend a team workshop if you’re not going to learn and enjoy it? I find workshops are usually as great as the participants make it – especially in an open, active environment where everybody participates and learns together. Generally speaking, when people are invited to workshops and they get to actively learn, get involved, present, brainstorm and work on tasks together – they enjoy the experience, use some of the skills from the workshop in the context of their own projects, and want to attend more workshops!

Dec 31

2016 – Year in Review

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Another year gone by and I’m glad to say that it’s been another great year of learning, overcoming challenges, achieving many goals, and doing some great, challenging, purposeful work. Sure just like every year, there were tough days, but even those days offer things to learn from. It’s been a very rewarding year on the testing side of things. I continue to work hard, and be the honest, transparent, ethical professional I take great pride in being. I continue to read, write, engage in productive conversations with some very smart and awesome people. On the blog front, I didn’t write as much as I would’ve liked to, but that wasn’t due to less learning happening, but rather me celebrating and being occupied by things on the personal end of things.

Technical side of things

This year I started worked with XCode, and different SDK’s to help test and deliver mobile applications for iOS and Android platforms. I also started working again with the command line after not using it much for the past few years. I got to see more C++ code, see and understand some Python code, understand Git a little better, fetch code commits to build iOS and Android applications locally. I also learned different ways to build applications pointing to mock servers running on my machine and how to mock different data that the application uses to allow me to test different scenarios and situations. I made better use of different tools such as Charles, Wireshark, iOS Console, DDMS, and others to help me test the integration of the different components and services that our applications use. I had the opportunity to test analytics, which enhanced my knowledge of analytics as I got to work with and test different services including Google, Adobe, and Apteligent. I continued to work on some very technical things that required me to do some research and learn more about the technology that I was testing. I continued to figure stuff out – and had fun while doing so.

Testing and leadership side of things

I am a very hands on Test Lead, and I work very closely with developers as part of an Agile team – it’s something I enjoy and look for in a workplace. I’m very glad I have it. I also lead, coach, and mentor a small group of software testers. This year I’ve done more workshops for my teams than any other year. My workshops this year covered many topics including mind maps, different ways a mind maps can be put together, test coverage, test reporting, exploratory testing, and testing missions. My workshop style is very engaging, and highly participatory for the attendees. I like everybody to be involved, to participate, and contribute – the goal is for active learning to take place. I always considered my audience when giving any workshop or training, and I’ve learned that different people have different learning styles and will learn at different paces – that is okay.

As part of my coaching duties, I also see that different members of my team learn in different ways, and that as a coach, its important for me to tailor my techniques to help different members for my team learn and improve how they’re doing things. I’m doing a lot of teaching, but I’m also getting to learn a lot while doing it. And most importantly, I am enjoying it – working with a small team of testers willing and able to learn is a big responsibility but a rewarding one as well. My job in leading the team is to help each member of my team learn, reach their goals, and become a better tester, and work together to help the team become better, more skilled, and better suited to add more value in different ways as a well-oiled test team.

2017 …

So with 2017 right around the corner, I want to continue doing great work, enhancing my technical knowledge both on the mobile and automation front, being an even better leader for the team and helping them reach new heights. I will try to blog more than I did last year – I have so much to write about! I also plan on getting more involved on the VR side of things, and may tweet and write some stuff about testing VR. I would like to attend CAST2017, so I’ll work on making that happen. I may finally enrol in the BBST Bug Advocacy course. With the course being offered twice during the year, my schedule the past few years hasn’t allowed me to do so yet. And most importantly, I’ll continue to have fun doing what I love to do.