Photo by Rainy Wongon Unsplash

How We Built Testability with Psychological Safety [External post]

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Ben Linders recently interviewed me for my talk at AgileTD on how we failed at testability. That resulted in this InfoQ post about how to build in testability you need developers and testers to collaborate. But to be able to do that, you need…
Fear is a reaction. Courage is a decision by Cristi Ursea on Unsplash

The courage to supercharge your testability

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Testability is all about building quality-in. It's about identifying known issues before they become a problem while coding. Pairing testers into this process can supercharge the testability feedback loop. It can allow you to pick up known and unknown issues. But pairing devs and testers together needs courage.
Baby spider by Umesh Soni from unsplash

Test Automation: Don't report the bugs it catches

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Reading time: 3 minutes Don’t report the bugs your test automation catches. Report the reduction in uncertainty that the system works. When you report the bugs you send the signal that test automation is there to catch bugs. But that’s…
Testing techniques plotted on a speed, value, environment axis

Exploratory and Automated testing: Using the right techniques in the wrong contexts

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Exploratory testing is about testing in an unpredictable context and therefore detecting unpredictable failures in our software. Automated testing is about testing in a predictable context and therefore detecting predictable failures. The mistake we make with automation is we try to apply it to the wrong context
Picture of a takeaways at night in Margate

My biggest takeaways from AgileTD 2020: The future of testers isn’t in automation or testing

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I was lucky enough to speak at AgileTD this year and also attend some of the talks. These are my main takeaways from the conference based on the talks that I was able to make. My confirmation bias sense is tingling with this but…   The…
sunset and signposts

Future of testers: somewhere between users, teams and businesses

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3 minute read I've been thinking a lot recently about what the future of the testers role could look like. Especially in teams that not only fully embrace CI/CD or DevOps but actually get some way towards implementing the ideas behind the…

Building a quality culture: Is it quality assurance or quality awareness?

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A way to see if the work your are doing in your team is about building team awareness or team assurance of quality
shallow focus of lovelocks

Building confidence with automation

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For automation to be accepted and therefore successful people need to feel confident in the process, but how do you do that for test automation? "Show" them the process or build trust with the person doing the work.
Three questions of unit testing

How to document Unit Testing

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Whenever you talk about unit testing with teams they never tell you what it means to them. They go straight to of course we do and show you 100s of passing tests. Interesting thing is by calling it unit testing everyone thinks they are talking…
Tech wall at the design museum

Building Quality in via Testability

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7 minute read Back in March 2018 I visited The Design Museum in London and came across the above installation. What you can see is technology design classics all the way from the first transistor radios on one side to the very first digital…