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Are Testers still relevant?

07 Sep, 2014
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Last week I talked to one of my colleagues about a tester in his team. He told me that the tester was bored, because he had nothing to do. All the developers wrote and executed their tests themselves. Which makes sense, because the tester 2.0 tries to make the team test infected.
So what happens if every developer in the team has the Testivus? Are you still relevant on the Continuous Delivery train?
Come and join the discussion at the Open Kitchen Test Automation: Are you still relevant?

Testers 1.0
Remember the days when software testers where consulted after everything was built and released for testing. Testing was a big fat QA phase, which was a project by itself. The QA department consisted of test managers analyzing the requirements first. Logical test cases were created and were subordinated to test executors, who created physical test cases and executed them manually. Testers discovered conflicting requirements and serious issues in technical implementations. Which is good obviously. You don’t want to deliver low quality software. Right?
So product releases were being delayed and the QA department documented everything in a big fat test report. And we all knew it: The QA department had to do it all over again after the next release.
I remember being a tester during those days. I always asked myself: Why am I always the last one thinking about ways to break the system? Does the developer know how easily this functionality can be broken? Does the product manager know that this requirement does not make sense at all?
Everyone hated our QA department. We were portrayed as slow, always delivering bad news and holding back the delivery cycle. But the problem was not delivering the bad news. The timing was.
The way of working needed to be changed.
Testers 2.0
We started training testers to help Agile teams deliver high quality software during development: The birth of the Tester 2.0 – The Agile Tester.
These testers master the Agile Manifesto, processes and methods that come with it. Collaboration about quality is the key here. Agile Testing is a mindset. And everyone is responsible for the quality of the product. Testers 2.0 helped teams getting (more) test infected. They thought like a researcher instead of a quality gatekeeper. They became part of the software development and delivery teams and they looked into possibilities to speed up testing efforts. So they practiced several exploratory testing techniques. Focused on reasonable and required tests, given the constraints of a sprint.
When we look back at several Agile teams having a shared understanding about Agile Testing, we saw many multidisciplinary teams becoming two separate teams: One is for developers and the other for QA / Testers.
I personally never felt comfortable in those teams. Putting testers with a group of developers is not Agile Testing. Developers still left testing for testers, and testers passively waited for developers to deploy something to be tested. At some point testers became a bottleneck again so they invested in test automation. So testers became test automators and build their own test code in a separate code base than development code. Test automators also picked tools that did not foster team responsibility. Therefore Test Automation got completely separated from product development. We found ways to help testers, test automators and developers to collaborate by improving the process. But that was treating the symptom of the problem. Developers were not taking responsibility in automated tests. And testers did not help developers designing testable software.
We want test automators and developers to become the same people.
Testers 3.0
If you want to accelerate your business you’ll need to become iterative, delivering value to production as soon as possible by doing Continuous Delivery properly. So we need multidisciplinary teams to shorten feedback loops coming from different point of views.
Testers 3.0 are therefore required to accelerate the business by working in these following areas:
Requirement inspection: Building the right thing
The tester 3.0 tries to understand the business problem of requirements by describing examples. It’s important to get common understanding between the business and technical context. So the tester verifies them as soon as possible and uses this as input for Test Automation and use BDD as a technique where a Human Readable Language is fostered. These testers work on automated acceptance tests as soon as possible.
Test Automation: Boosting the software delivery process
When common understanding is reached and the delivery team is ready to implement the requested feature, the tester needs programming skills to make the acceptance tests in a clean code state. The tester 3.0 uses appropriate Acceptance Test Driven Development tools (like Cucumber), which the whole team supports. But the tester keeps an eye out for better, faster and easier automated testing frameworks to support the team.
At the Xebia Craftsmanship Seminar (a couple of months ago) someone asked me if testers should learn how to write code.
I told him that no one is good at everything. But the tester 3.0 has good testing skills and enough technical baggage to write automated acceptance tests. Continuous Delivery teams have a shared responsibility and they automate all boring steps like manual test scripts, performance and security tests. It’s very important to know how to automate; otherwise you’ll slow down the team. You’ll be treated the same as anyone else in the delivery team.
Testers 3.0 try to get developers to think about clean code and ensuring high quality code. They look into (and keep up with) popular development frameworks and address the testability of it. Even the test code is evaluated for quality attributes continuously. It needs the same love and caring as getting code into production.
Living documentation: Treating tests as specifications
At some point you’ll end up with a huge set of automated tests telling you everything is fine. The tester 3.0 treats these tests as specifications and tries to create a living document, which is used for long term requirements gathering. No one will complain about these tests when they are all green and passing. The problem starts when tests start failing and no one can understand why. Testers 3.0 think about their colleague when they write a specification or test. They need to clearly specify what is being tested in a Human Readable Language.
They are used to changing requirements and specifications. And they don’t make a big deal out of it. They understand that stakeholders can change their mind once a product comes alive. So the tester makes sure that important decisions made during new requirement inspections and development are stored and understood.
Relevant test results: Building quality into the process
Testers 3.0 focus on getting extreme fast feedback to determine the software quality of software products every day. Every night. Every second.
Testers want to deploy new working software features into production more often. So they do whatever it takes to build a high quality pipeline decreasing the quality feedback time during development.
Everyone in your company deserves to have confidence in the software delivery pipeline at any moment. Testers 3.0 think about how they communicate these types of feedback to the business. They provide ways to automatically report these test results about quality attributes. Testers 3.0 ask the business to define quality. Knowing everything was built right, how can they measure they’ve built the right thing? What do we need to measure when the product is in production?
How to stay relevant as a Tester
So what happens when all of your teammates are completely focused on high quality software using automation?
Testing does not require you to manually click, copy and paste boring scripted test steps you didn’t want to do in the first place. You were hired to be skeptical about anything and make sure that all risks are addressed. It’s still important to keep being a researcher for your team and test curiosity accordingly.
Besides being curious, analytical and having great communication skills, you need to learn how to code. Don’t work harder. Work smarter by analyzing how you can automate all the boring checks so you’ll have more time discovering other things by using your curiosity.
Since testing drives software development, and should no longer be treated as a separate phase in the development process, it’s important that teams put test automation in the center of all design decisions. Because we need Test Automation to boost the software delivery by building quality sensors in every step of the process. Every day. Every night. Every second!
Do you want to discuss this topic with other Testers 3.0?  Come and join the Open Kitchen: Test Automation and get on board the Continuous Delivery Train!
Qxperts. We empower companies to deliver reliable & high-quality software. Any questions? We are here to help! www.qxperts.io

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