My CAST debrief from last week ended up being mostly about personal reflection, but I also wanted to call out the some of the things I picked up more specific to testing. After going through my notes I picked out what I thought where the important themes or interesting insights. There are many other tidbits, interactions, and ideas from those notes that I may write about later, these are just the top seven that I think will have an impact right away.
Each section here is paraphrased from the notes I took in each speaker’s session.
1. “Because we don’t like uncertainty we pretend we don’t have it”
Liz Keogh presented a keynote on using Cynefin as a way of embracing uncertainty and chaos in how we work. We are hard wired to see patterns where they don’t exist. “We treat complexity as if it’s predictable.” People experience the highest stress when shocks are unpredictable, so let’s at least prepare for them. To be safe to fail you have to be able to (1) know if it works, (2) amplify it if it does work, (3) know of it fails, (4) dampen it if it does fail, and (5) have a realistic reason for thinking there will be a positive impact in the first place. It’s not about avoiding failure, it’s about being prepared for it. The linked article above is definitely worth the read.
2. Testers are designers
From John Cutler’s keynote: “Design is the rendering of intent”. Anybody who makes decisions that affect that rendering is a designer. What you test, when you test, who you include, your mental models of the customer, and how we talk about what we find all factor in. UX researchers to have to know that they aren’t the user, but often the tester has used the product more than anybody else in the group. There’s no such thing as a design solution, but there is a design rationale. There should be a narrative around the choices we make for our products, and testers provide a ton of the information for that narrative. Without that narrative, no design was happening (nor any testing!) because there’s no sense of the intent.
3. Knowledge goes stale faster than tickets on a board do
From Liz Keogh’s lightning talk: If testers are at their WIP limit and devs can’t push any more work to them, your team will actually go faster if you make the devs go read a book rather than take on new work that will just pile up. You lose more productivity in catching up on work someone has already forgotten about than you gain in “getting ahead”. In practice, of course, you should have the devs help the testers when they’re full and the testers help the devs when they have spare capacity. (By the way, it’s not a Kanban board unless you have a signal for when you can take on new work, like an empty slot in a column. That empty slot is the kanban.)
4. “No matter how it looks at first, it’s always a people problem” – Jerry Weinberg
I don’t recall which session this quote first came up in, but it became a recurring theme in many of the sessions and discussions, especially around coaching testing, communicating, and whole-team testing. Jerry passed away just before the conference started, and though I had never met him he clearly had a strong influence on many of the people there. He’s probably most often cited for his definition that “quality is value to some person”.
5. Pair testing is one of the most powerful techniques we have
Though I don’t think anybody said this explicitly, this was evident to me from how often the concept came up. Lisi Hocke gave a talk about pairing with testers from other companies to improve her own testing while cross-pollinating testing ideas and skills with the wider community. Amit Wertheimer cited pairing with devs as a great way to identify tools and opportunities to make their lives easier. Jose Lima talked about running group exploratory testing sessions and the benefits that brings in learning about the product and coaching testing. Of course coaching itself, I think, is a form of pairing so the tutorial with Anne-Marie Charrett contributed to this theme as well. This is something that I need to do more of.
6. BDD is not about testing, it’s about collaboration
From Liz Keogh again: “BDD is an analysis technique, it’s not about testing.” It’s very hard to refactor English and non-technical people rarely read the cucumber scenarios anyway. She says to just use a DSL instead. If you’re just implementing cucumber tests but aren’t having a 3-amigos style conversation with the business about what the scenarios should be, it isn’t BDD. Angie Jones emphasized these same points when introducing cucumber in her automation tutorial as a caveat that she was only covering the automation part of BDD in the tutorial, not BDD itself. Though I’ve worked in styles that called themselves “behaviour driven”, I’ve never worked with actual “BDD”, and this was the first time I’ve heard of it being more than a way of automating test cases.
7. Want to come up with good test ideas? Don’t read the f*ing manual!
From Paul Holland: Detailed specifications kill creativity. Start with high level bullet points and brainstorm from there. Share ideas round-robin (think of playing “yes and“) to build a shared list. Even dumb ideas can trigger good ideas. Encourage even non-sensical ideas since users will do things you didn’t think of. Give yourself time and space away to allow yourself to be creative, and only after you’ve come up with every test idea you can should you start looking at the details. John Cleese is a big inspiration here.
Bonus fact: Anybody can stop a rocket launch
The “T-minus” countdown for rocker launches isn’t continuous, they pause it at various intervals and reset it back to checkpoints when they have to address something. What does this have to do with testing? Just that the launch of the Parker Solar Probe was the weekend after CAST. At 3:30am on Saturday I sat on the beach with my husband listening to the live feed from NASA as the engineers performed the pre-launch checks: starting, stopping, and resetting the clock as needed. I was struck by the fact that at “T minus 1 minute 55 seconds” one calm comment from one person about one threshold being crossed scrubbed the entire launch without any debate. There wouldn’t be time to rewind to the previous checkpoint at T-minus 4 minutes before the launch window closed, so they shut the whole thing down. I’m sure that there’s an analogy to the whole team owning gates in their CD pipelines in there somewhere!
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