Adam White

I have to give hats off to John Creson – a tester at Autodesk. When he arrived at the testers lunch today he brought a person from his support team! WHAT!!! A support person hanging out with a bunch of testers?? Can’t be. Really?

It’s true – it’s a real life story of teams working together. My last post because was too close to lunch for him to gaming the system

Hats of to John for expanding our testing circle to include people from his support team.

Way to go John!

I’m about to let the cat out of the bag. Some of you know it already – some of you don’t. 

If you really care about quality work on improving people’s relationship to your software. Don’t stop there – take it to the next level. Work on improving how the people who work on your software interact with each other.

Get support and test working together – really working together. Have people switch roles for a couple of days – walk a mile in the other guys shoes. Have them shadow each other. Get your testers and developers together (if they aren’t already). And GAASSP.

Get your developers and your support reps working together.

Don’t just get them exchanging emails. That’s not going to help. Sitting in on meetings together doesn’t do much either. Have developers start taking support calls. Writing KB articles, reviewing calls with support, dealing with irate customers.

I bet you might have a team of services guys out “in the real world”, flying around to customers, helping them out, fixing issues, working with support. Why not hook them up with the testers and developers too? Don’t tell me they don’t have time to help improve Quality.

Like magic better people interactions make quality problems disappear

If these teams really work together I can promise you something magical will start to happen. Your quality problems will start to disappear. Magically. Poof!! Gone.

Why? Because you have increased the value you provide to your customers. Quality is NOT an attribute of software. You can’t touch it, you can’ count it. Quality is a relationship between the user and the software. So keep working on it.

Here’s the thing. If your customers find a bug and you deal with it in a timely and appropriately manner – your customers will more than likely not be upset. If you have a skilled support person they will take ownership and let the customer know their issue is being looked into. They can follow up with the customer – even if you don’t have a fix yet. That’s crazy talk man!! Make the customer feel like their issue is important and follow up even if we don’t have fix!! Pffft.

Does this mean that customers won’t get mad? No.

Does this mean your support guys won’t want to hang up on rude customers? No.

But it does mean your customers might be happier when it comes to renew their support and services contract because they got value out of it. They aren’t just a number anymore – the are a real, living human being that someone at your company cares about.

The metrics game

Once you start you are going to run into a problem   (more…)

So here’s the thing. I’m on vacation for a month. My boss told me to disconnect from work completely – no emails, no blackberry, no nothing. So I did. I’ve been trying not chat with team members on msn. etc, etc, etc. And I’ve been successful at that (for the most part).

I failed at one thing though. I can’t disconnect from testing. It’s in my blood. It’s like a drug. I crave it. I get a rush when I’m learning, when I get in that tester mindset, and I’m interact with intellectually stimulating people.  People who think differently and don’t follow the herd.  Those who say wait a minute let’s look at what’s going on here. Testing is so much a part of what I do and what I’m so passionate about.

Ok Boss I can disconnect from day to day project demands and release schedules – Fine. But disconnect from testing? Forget it!! I can’t. Even with our new house I’m being a tester all the time if you take Weinberg’s definition “A tester is someone who knows things can be different”. House ownership has definitely taught me that things can be different.

Here are some examples of how I can’t get away from testing and i’m learning how things can be different.

I spent most of yesterday reading “The Gift of Time”. Then I spent some time thinking about James Bach’s

recent post on Quality is Dead. Do I agree with him or not? At first yes – but then no.  Still deciding. I can argue it either way. Maybe there is a blog post there for me.

Last night I had dinner with Rob Sabourin who is in town teaching his course for a client. If you ever need someone to get you pumped about testing just give Rob a shout! Having dinner with Rob is just so damn interesting. I know the conversation is interesting and valuable when I’ve started taking notes on the table. It’s even more interesting when I tear that paper off and bring it home with me for later reference.  Who else do you know of that can link software testing to Dr. Seuss. Who else can stand up on a stage and do a presentation called “What baseball taught me about software testing” or “What the the looney tunes taught me about software testing”. Rob can! He inspired me to write about Curious George as a tester. I got rejected by a magazine so I gave up on it.  I’m going to dust that piece off and put it on my blog.

Last year I was telling Rob about the link between my training at second city improv and testing. He told me I should write about it – which I did. I wrote up some thoughts but my inner critic got in my way and I didn’t put any more effort into it. I think it’s time to kick that critic in the ass – thanks Rob!

The energy Rob brings to the testing community is great. I’ve had the priviledge of attending his JIT (Just in Time testing) course as an auditor and also to bring him in to my company to do work on visual modeling. Great stuff. If you want to give your testers a kick of energy – have them do visual modeling with Rob. I promise they won’t look at things the same way afterwards.  My team definitely did not.

I found Michele Smith’s blog  from a link on James’ site. I liked what I saw so I read her recent posts. I found a link to pre-order Secrets of a Buccaneer Scholar, James’ new book from Amazon.  So I put that in my basket. Thanks Michele!

From her site I also found Michael Bolton ‘s article/presentation called “T he Two Futures Of Software Testing“.  I spent the whole morning devouring it, thinking about what he is saying.  I know Michael is at Novell this week at their Quality Summit 2009 and teaching RST afterwards. I hope it’s going well for him. 

I’ve been dusting off my testing skills with the help of Rypple and TinEye.

I’m having lunch tomorrow with a bunch of testers in Toronto. I love these conversations!!!

I’m so pumped about testing or should I say knowing things can be different. I often get this way when I’m at conferences where I can think about testing without day to day project demands.  I’ve got the better part of a whole month left to work on my testing skills! I feel like I am in a very fortunate place

The purpose of this entire exercise is to show how I would apply the heuristic test strategy model developed by James Bach

What follows in the post is the notes from my first testing session intended to show show my thought process during my exploration.

*Warning – I’m stepping out on a limb here. I’m putting my work out there for review. Keep in mind they are my notes and may not make sense to you. They aren’t edited for spelling mistakes, grammar or anything else. The notes were taking as a stream of consciousness while I was testing.

If you want to know more about session based testing check out the this write up

To accompany my notes I have a 60 minute video taken with BB Test assistant. I also have a few screenshots that I took. I will try to find a way to post these so that i’m mindful of bandwidth constraints.

# Charter: Explore Rypple functionality

# Tester: Adam K White

# Length: Normal

# Charter vs opportunity
100% charter

# Set-up
0

# Notes
Clicked link in email for account activation. Typed in a 52 character password. After putting in my password again to verify I was asked to invite contacts I was prompted with a page that asked me to watch a video to get started. It showed import contacts on this page as well. I would think import contacts should have been on the invite page for those who are familar with the functionality.

The main functionality seeems to be
- Get feedback
- Review feedback
- Give Feedback
- My Network

In the top frame we have
- Welcome, Adam
- Help
- Give Us feedback
- Logout

I will explore the functionalities within the get feedback area.

Get feedback has 3 sections

Section 1
What is your question?

Max Characters appear to be 140. The training video said 100. This is inconsistent. I would imagine they found that 100 characters is not enough. The text box that appears to allow 2 lines of text to accomodate 140 characters. I would assume 70 characters per line. Will test later.

There is an icon of lightbulb below the “What is your question text box” with a + sign at the bottom right of it. A mouse over shows a tool top of suggested questions. Click the button expands a list of canned questions.

Section 2
What is your question about?

Text box has the following text
<Select up to 3 attibutes, seperated by a comma. E.g. leadership, negotiating, communication>

There is a similar light bulb icon which upon clicking reveals key words such as
leadership, integrity, presentation, attitude, communication, more attributes

Clicking more attibutes reveals
delegation, vision, strategy, listening, reliability less attributes

Noticed the the L in Less attibutes in capitilized. Problem? Don’t remember if the m in more attributes is capitalized. Clicking less attributes confirms that it is. Should it be? Something says to me that is should be. It’s consistent within itself but it violates something else. Will think about it.

No character max displayed
Section 3

How do you want to ask?

Two radio buttons
- Ask advisers through email
- Get a unique URL

There are two blue icons that seem to indicate information.

Just noticed them in the other sections as well.

Clicking gives a tooltip/fly out of information.

Text box is bigger than previous two. Appears to be 3 lines. No character max displayed

Can createa group from these advisors as well. Interesting functionality. I wonder how many people can be in a group of advisers.

—–

At the bottom of the 3 main sections there is a personalize your request, preview and create feedback request.
Personalize your request
- Shows a 3 line text box. Max appears to be 440 characters

Below the text box there is an arrow that reminds me of the undo arro in word or something similar to a back button in a browser. Mouse over shows a fly out saying “Reset personal message”. Seems to fit my expectations.

Preview
- Click preview says that need to enter at least one attribute. Thought this was strange. I expected it to ask me to enter a question first. Scrolling up I found that I had a question in there.

Removed question and clicked preview. Program prompted me to type a question. That meets my expecations.
Going to sumbit a question now.

Typed question “How would you test this program?”

Attributes “testing, listening, delegation”

I wonder if there is character max on the attributes – test for later

Unchecked rate these attributes

Started typing the emails of people i added earlier during invite session. They show up in a drop down while typing. Meets my expecations. If they didn’t show up I’d be disappointed.

Typed a personal message “I’d like your help in exploring this program. I’m testing it out for fun – not for profit. ”

Click Preview Shows a dialog. First line is a red circle with a white exclamation point in it. Text to the right of it says “Heads up. You’re one of two people being asked”

That’s odd – since I didn’t typ in my own email. Investigate later

Sumbitted my question. Dialog shows submitting and then success I think. Don’t rememeber and wasn’t taking a video.

Final page shows the date, my question, advisers asked, attributes, labels.

Not sure what this label business is about – investigate later.

Drop down box with “select action” is visible. text in box says add advisors, close request, send reminder.

There is a button called share feedback – will investigate later

There is a page divider and below it shows

No responses so far with links Download CSV, Expand All, Collapse all. Then button with Share feedback and back to listing.

These buttons seem to be duplicates of the ones from the top of the frame. Might make more sense once I’ve asked more questions and gotten feedback.

Going to stop this session now, clean up my notes and organize my findings

While typing up notes I noticed that I’m now in the review my feedback section.
# Issues/Things to follow up on
- Not being given the option to import contact right away after activating. I might have missed it. I have no way to reset my account to “new”. As a tester this would a useful tool to have. Often times I want to set my account back to a known state. Unfortunetly this doesn’t always work properly either.

Click Preview shows red circle with a white exclamation point in it. Text to the right of it says “Heads up. You’re one of two people being asked”. I wasn’t one of the two people being asked


# Test ideas
- Test for max characters in text boxes
- Research share feedback functionality
- Research labels under review my feedback.
- Explore download CSV functionality
- Explore Expand all and collapse all
- Create a workflow diagram of all the dialogs and their functionality.
- Find a way to do some automatic data input and exercise the workflow.

From my test ideas I have a set of new charters to explore. It took me roughly 60 minutes to get this basic list of ideas. From there there are a few different directions I can take. I can discuss the issues I found and I could prioritize my test ideas with them. Before I run off and operate the product more I can also jump off on a different thread. Stay tuned….

I did some exploring on their site and liked their premise “Get fast, honest, feedback from people you trust” 3 easy steps 1) Ask a question of people you trust  2) Get honest, private feedback 3) Use their feedback to improve. Sounds easy enough. I noticed that they are in beta so I thought I would sign up and try their product out.

I got a note saying it would be a few days before my account was set up. I sent them a note stating that I’d like to test their product for two reasons. I’m a Director of Software Testing who would like to get back in touch with hands on testing during vacation and secondly I really like the idea behind the product since I’m a Director of Testing and enjoy feedback. I got my activation within about an hour Sometimes it pays to ask.

I’ve been watching James Bach and Michael Bolton’s blog threads on their testing of IMVU. They have uncovered some things I find very interesting. Most of the items pointed out in IMVUs software turned out to be not important by IMVU’s standards and their impression of what end users want (and I got the impression that it wasn’t important to IMVU as a business either).

One thing I would like to see James and Michael blog about is how they could provide information to IMVU that was useful and important to them. What is that IMVU actually cares about in regards to its software? How does one go about discovering this information?

I decided I could demonstrate my process for discovering this type of information. I’ve been heavily influenced by James and Michael throughout my career and this seems like a great way to showcase those learnings applied to products most people can access.

What I will be posting over the next few days is my interpretation of the heuristic test strategy model and the principles of Rapid Software Testing applied to two applications I have been exploring. The first one is called TinEye from Idee and the second one is a product called Rypple 

I’m still forming notes – so stay tuned for my findings.

P.S – Thanks to those who wrote to give me a kick in the butt to remind me to write