Analytics - The Brain of the Software

An Analogy 

I am not a doctor, nor did I enjoy biology too much in my curriculum as a student.  However, I do know that the body has many organs and each organ plays a vital role in the well being of the individual.

Each organ has to:

• function correctly (movement, senses, core functions, etc.)

• has to perform as per expectations in different conditions the individual may be going through (walking, running, swimming, etc.)

• has to be secure from external parameters (heat, cold, rain, what we eat / drink, etc.)

• has to have a proper user experience (ex: if the human hands had webs like ducks, would we be able to hold a pen correctly to write?

• I would like to think of the brain as the super computer which keeps track of what is going on in the body, if each piece playing its part correctly, or not. And if there is something unexpected going on, then there are mechanisms of giving that feedback internally and externally so that course correction would be possible.

How does this relate to software?

Software is similar in some ways. For any software product to work, the following needs to be done:

Functionality works as expected

• The architecture, testability of the system will allow for various types of testing activities to be performed on the software to ensure everything works as expected
• Test Automation practices will give you quick feedback

There is a plethora of open-source and commercial tools in this space to help in this regard - the most popular open-source tools being Selenium and Appium.

Software is performant

• We can do performance testing at various different levels to ensure at different loads and conditions, the users will be able to use the product in a seamless fashion
• There are many tools to assist in Performance Testing - some popular ones being JMeter and Gatling.

Software is secure

• Building and testing for security is critical as you do not want user information to be leaked or manipulated and neither do you want to allow external forces to control / manipulate your product behaviour and control
• The Test Automation Pyramid hence also includes NFRs

User experience is validated, and consistent

• In the age of CD (Continuous Delivery & Continuous Deployment), you need to ensure your user experience across all your software delivery means (browsers, mobile-browsers, native apps for mobiles and tablets, etc.) is consistent and users do not face the brunt of UI / look-and-feel issues in the software at the cost of new features
• This is a relatively new domain - but there are already many tools to help in this spaces as well - the most popular one (in terms of integration, usage and features) being the AI-powered Applitools

Visual Validation is the new tip of the Test Automation Pyramid!

What is the brain of the software?

The above is all good, and known in various ways. But what is the "brain" of the software? How does one know if everything is working fine or not? Who will receive the feedback and how do we take corrective action on this?

Analytics is that piece in the Software product that functions as the brain. It keeps collecting data about each important piece of software, and provides feedback on the same.

I have come across some extreme examples of Business / Organizations who have all their eggs in one basket - in terms of

• understand their Consumers (engagement / usage / patterns / etc.),
• understand usage of product features, and,
• do all revenue-related book-keeping

This is all done purely on Analytics! Hence, to say “Business runs on Analytics, and it may be OK for some product / user features to not work correctly, but Analytics should always work” - is not a myth!

What this means is Analytics is more important now, than before.

Unfortunately, Analytics is not known much to the Software Dev + Test community. We know it very superficially - and do what is required to implement it and quickly test it out. But what is analytics? Why is it important? What is the impact of this not working well? Not many think about this.

I have been testing Analytics since 2010 ... and the kind of insights I have been able to get about the product have been huge! I have been able to contribute back to the team and help build better quality software as a result.

But I have to be honest - it is painful to test Analytics. And that is why I created an open-source framework - WAAT - to help automate some of this testing activities.

I also do workshops to help people learn more about Analytics, its importance, and how they can automate this as well.

In the workshop, I do not assume anything and approach is to discuss and learn by example and practice, the following

• How does Analytics works (for Web and Mobile)?
• Test Analytics manually in different ways
• Test Analytics via the final reports
• Why some Automation strategies will work, and some WILL NOT WORK (based on my experience)!
• We will see a demo of the Automation running for the same.
• Time permitting, we will setup running some Automation scripts on your machine to validate the same

Takeaways from the workshop

We will learn by practicing the following:

• What is Analytics?
• Techniques to test analytics manually.
• How to automate the validation of analytics, via a demo, and if time permits, run the automation from your machine as well.

Hope this post helps you understand the importance of Analytics and why you need to know more about it. Do reach out to me if you want to learn more about it.

Next upcoming Analytics workshop is in TestBash Australia 2019. Let me know if you would be interested in attending the same

Test Automation Pyramid

Quality & Release Strategy for Native Android & iOS Apps at AppiumConf 2019

What an amazing time speaking at the first AppiumConf 2019 in Bangalore, India. I spoke about my experiences in setting "Quality & Release Strategy for Native Android & iOS Apps"

Abstract:
Experimentation and quick feedback is the key to success of any product, while of course ensuring a good quality product with new and better features is being shipped out at a decent / regular frequency to the users.

In this session, we will discuss how to enable experimentation, get quick feedback and reduce risk for the product by using a case study of a media / entertainment domain product, used by millions of users across 10+ countries - i.e. - we will discuss Testing Strategy and the Release process an Android & iOS Native app - that will help enable CI & CD.

To understand these techniques, we will quickly recap the challenges and quirks of testing Native Apps and how that is different than Web / Mobile Web Apps.

The majority of the discussion will focus on different techniques / practices related to Testing & Releases that can be established to achieve our goals, some of which are listed below:

• Functional Automation approach - identify and automate user scenarios, across supported regions
• Testing approach - what to test, when to test, how to test!
• Manual Sanity before release - and why it was important!
• Staged roll-outs via Google’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store
• Extensive monitoring of the release as users come on board, and comparing the key metrics (ex: consumer engagement) with prior releases
• Understanding Consumer Sentiments (Google’s Play Store / Apple’s App Store review comments, Social Media scans, Issues reported to / by Support, etc.)

Slides:

Quality & Release Strategy for Native Android & iOS Apps from Anand Bagmar

Visual Validation - The Missing Tip of the Automation Pyramid at QuaNTA NXT at Globant

I spoke about Visual Validation - The Missing Tip of the Automation Pyramid at QuaNTA NXT event organised by Globant India Pvt. Ltd.

The event was very well organised and I had the opportunity to interact with a full house, and also later meet and talk with a lot of interesting people - curious about current state of testing, test automation and how AI can impact it in the future.

Agenda:

Below is the abstract of my talk:

The Test Automation Pyramid is not a new concept. While Automation helps validate functionality of your product, the look & feel / user-experience (UX) validation is still mostly manual.

With everyone wanting to be Agile, doing quick releases, this look & feel / UX validation becomes the bottleneck, and also is a very error-prone activity which causes brand, revenue and leads diluting your user-base.

In this session, we will explore why Automated Visual Validation is now essential in your Automation Strategy and also look at how an AI-powered tool - Applitools Eyes, can solve this problem.

Recording from the talk:

Some pictures:

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Visual validation - The Missing Tip of the Automation Pyramid

At yet-another-vodQA at ThoughtWorks, this time in the Pune edition on 16th March 2019, I spoke about Visual validation - The Missing Tip of the Automation Pyramid

Abstract:

The Test Automation Pyramid is not a new concept. The top of the pyramid is our UI / end-2-end functional tests - which should cover the breadth of the product.

What the functional tests cannot capture though, is the aspects of UX validations that can only be seen and in some cases, captured by the human eye. This is where the new buzzwords of AI & ML can truly help.

In this session, we will explore why Visual Validation is an important cog in the wheel of Test Automation and also different tools and techniques that can help achieve this. We will also see a demo of Applitools Eyes - and how it can be a good option to close this gap in automation!

Slides are available from here

Visual Validation - The Missing Tip of the Automation Pyramid from Anand Bagmar

Video is available here:

Thanks to Priyank Shah for this pic!

I also received some awesome feedback for the same.

Thanks vodQA Team! Till next time, adios!

Test Automation in the World of AI and ML

My article on "Test Automation in the World of AI & ML" recently got published on InfoQ.


Here are the key takeaways mentioned in the article -

• There are many criteria to be considered before building framework / selecting tools for Functional Test Automation
• It is very important to prioritise framework / tools capabilities needed for the software-under-test
• A good, scalable Test Automation Framework that provides fast and reliable feedback to the team enables collaboration and CI/CD
• Debugging / RCA (root cause analysis) and support for libraries / tools used is an afterthought in most cases. Do not fall in that trap.
• There are some promising commercial tools that fit seamlessly in the Agile way of working. Depending on the complete context, these tools may be a good choice over building your own framework for Functional Automation.

You can read the full article from here. 

Looking forward to comments on the same!

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Recording from webinar on The Missing Feedback Loop now available

On 21st Nov, TestCraft.io hosted me in a webinar where I spoke about - "The Missing Feedback Loop - The Tools, Techniques, and Automation to Solve It". 

You can get the recording from here (https://hubs.ly/H0fBDN50).

Is the Future of Test Automation I predicted already here?

Today, almost at the end of 2018, I have come across many tools focused on making Test Automation, easier, faster, reliable and more valuable to the teams & the product - like testim.io, testcraft.io, katalon, cypress.io, mabl, test.ai, etc. These tools are very interesting and very promising for the value proposition they are bringing to the table. 

As I reflect on these shiny new tools, my mind wanders back to 2009 / 2010 when I was toying with the idea of what would be next in Test Automation Tools & Infrastructure space. I had penned my thoughts and published an article on ThoughtWorks Insights with the title - "Future of Test Automation Tools & Infrastructure" (https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/future-test-automation-tools-infrastructure). 

If we look deeper in my post, the tools I mentioned above (and many others that I probably am unaware of), are conceptually on the lines of what I had sort-of thought in 2009 / 2010. They are using a very interesting blend of past experiences, in some cases advanced technology like AI & ML, in some cases leveraging cloud / SaaS model, and more importantly - pushing the boundaries to do things differently! I am personally very happy to see this happen.

That gets another set of questions in my mind now - if what I had thought of back then is now true, and a reality, then what is next? What will the next generation of new, interesting, shiny tools look like in the next 5 years?

Upcoming webinar - The Missing Feedback Loop

I am very excited to share that I am going to conduct a webinar hosted by testcraft.io on "The Missing Feedback Loop - The Tools, Techniques, and Automation to Solve It". 

You can register for the webinar from here (https://hubs.ly/H0fp4by0).

Date & Time:
Thursday, November 21, 2018 at 02:00 PM New-York (EDT), 11:00 AM San-Francisco (PDT) and 08:00 PM Amsterdam (UTC+2)

Agile Testing, Analytics Testing and Measuring Consumer Quality from Poland and USA

The last few weeks have been very hectic for me. In between my consulting assignments, I traveled to Krakow, Poland for Agile & Automation Days 2018, and then to Arlington, Virginia in USA for STPCon Fall 2018.

In the Agile & Automation Days 2018 conference, I spoke about "Measuring Consumer Quality - The Missing Feedback Loop" and conducted a 1/2 day workshop on "Analytics Rebooted - A Workshop".

In STPCon Fall 2018, I conducted 2 workshops - 1/2 day each - "Practical Agile Testing Workshop" and "Analytics Rebooted - A Workshop" and also spoke about "Measuring Consumer Quality - The Missing Feedback Loop"

Overall, I had a very good trip, amazing conversations and interactions with the attendees and the speakers. I would be lying if I say I am not tired and my throat has gone sore. But, would I do this again? Absolutely! Going to conferences and meeting people, sharing my experiences with them, and learning from their experiences gives me a lot of happiness and satisfaction.

Below are the abstracts of the workshops and the talk. 

Contact me via LinkedIn, or twitter, or my site - essenceoftesting.com if you need any additional information, or if you want help in learning / implementing these or other topics related to Quality / Testing / Automation.

Practical Agile Testing Workshop

Workshop Description:

The Agile Manifesto was published in 2001. It took the software industry a good few years to truly understand what the manifesto means, and the principles behind it. However, choosing and implementing the right set of practices to get the true value from working the Agile way has been the biggest challenge for most!

While Agile is now mainstream, and as we get better at the development practices to “being Agile”, Testing has still been lagging behind in most cases. A lot of teams are still working in the staggered fashion (a.k.a. Iterative waterfall way of working). Here teams may be testing after development completes, or Automation is done in the next Iteration / Sprint, etc.

In this workshop, we will learn and share various principles and practices which teams should adopt to be successful in testing (in-cycle) in Agile projects.

Workshop Agenda:

• What is Agile testing? - Learn what does it mean to Test on Agile Projects
• Effective strategies for Distributed Testing - Learn practices that help bridge the Distributed Testing gap!
• Test Automation in Agile Projects - Why? What? How? - Why is Test Automation important, and how do we implement a good, robust, scalable and maintainable Test Automation framework!
• Build the "right" regression suite using Behavior Driven Testing (BDT) - Behavior Driven Testing (BDT) is an evolved way of thinking about Testing. It helps in identifying the 'correct' scenarios, in form of user journeys, to build a good and effective (manual & automation) regression suite that validates the Business Goals. 

Key learning for participants in this workshop:

• Understand the Agile Testing Manifesto.
• Learn the essential Testing practices and activities essential for teams to adopt to work in Agile way of working.
• Discover techniques to do effective testing in distributed teams.
• Find out how Automation plays a crucial role in Agile projects.
• Learn how to build a good, robust, scalable and maintainable Functional Automation framework.
• Learn, by practice, how to identify the right types of tests to automate as UI functional tests - to get quick and effective feedback.

Analytics Rebooted – A Workshop

Workshop Description:

I have come across some extreme examples of Business / Organizations who have all their eggs in one basket - in terms of # understand their Consumers (engagement / usage / patterns / etc.), # understand usage of product features, and, # do all revenue-related book-keeping

This is all done purely on Analytics! Hence, to say “Business runs on Analytics, and it may be OK for some product / user features to not work correctly, but Analytics should always work” - is not a myth!

What this means is Analytics is more important now, than before.

In this workshop, we will not assume anything. We will discuss and learn by example and practice, the following:

• How does Analytics works (for Web & Mobile)? 
• Test Analytics manually in different ways 
• Test Analytics via the final reports
• Why some Automation strategies will work, and some WILL NOT WORK (based on my experience)!
• We will see demo of the Automation running for the same.
• Time permitting, we will setup running some Automation scripts on your machine to validate the same

Measuring Consumer Quality – The Missing Feedback Loop

Session Description:

How to build a good quality product is not a new topic. Proper usage of methodologies, processes, practices, collaboration techniques can yield amazing results for the team, the organization, and for the end-users of your product.

While there is a lot of emphasis on the processes and practices side, one aspect that is still spoken about “loosely” - is the feedback loop from your end-users to making better decisions.

SO, what is this feedback loop? Is it a myth? How do you measure it? Is there a “magic” formula to understand this data received? How to you add value to your product using this data?

In this interactive session, we will use a case study of a B2C entertainment-domain product (having millions of consumers) as an example to understand and also answer the following questions:

• The importance of knowing your Consumers
• How do you know your product is working well?
• How do you know your Consumers are engaged with your product?
• Can you draw inferences and patterns from the data to reach of point of being able to make predictions on Consumer behavior, before making any code change?

Attendees will have deeper understanding and appreciation of the following:

• What is Consumer Quality and how does it help shape your business!
• Ways to measure Consumer Quality
• Why is understanding Consumer Engagement vital to the success of your product

Conference season here is - talks, workshops, travelling, networking!

September & October 2018 is a busy conference season for me.

On 27th September, I played a game - "Collaboration - A Taboo!" at ATA GTR 2018 with an audience of 100+ people. There was absolute chaos in the game - a lot of it self-inflicted ... and thankfully - exactly was I wanted it to be. So much fun, energy and enthusiasm in the room meant there was no one feeling drowsy in the post lunch session! 

Typically I play this game in 45-min to 1 hour duration. At ATA GTR 2018 though, I had only 30 min to play the game, and add my own twist on top of it. But, never have I ever taken more than the allocated time - and I managed to get the objectives of the game achieved as well in these 30 min.

Below are some pictures from the game.




Then on 28th September, I spoke on "Measuring Consumer Quality - The Missing Feedback Loop" at StepIn's PSTC 2018. Slides from that talk can be found here.

In October, I will be off to Agile & Automation Days in Krakow, Poland. Here I will be speaking about "Measuring Consumer Quality - The Missing Feedback Loop" and also conducting a workshop on - "Analytics Rebooted - A Workshop". See detailed schedule here. 

Then I fly directly to Arlington, VA to participate in STPCon Fall 2018. Here I will be conducting 2 workshops - "Analytics Rebooted - A Workshop" and "Practical Agile Testing Workshop". I am also speaking about "Measuring Consumer Quality - The Missing Feedback Loop".

Will share experiences from these conferences soon!

Testing in the Agile World

Thanks to ThoughtWorks, I was introduced to many things - 

• Agile
• Blogging
• Speaking at conferences
• Contributing to Open-source
• ...
• ...

The list is actually quite long - but that is not the intention of this post.

The main takeaway in my learning at ThoughtWorks though, is how to Test better, and be more effective in that for the end-user. 

Even before my time at ThoughtWorks, I never agreed with the thought process that Functional Automation can / should be done only when the feature is stable. But at ThoughtWorks, I did learn many more tips and tricks and techniques and processes how to do this Functional Automation in a better way, as the product is evolving.

On 9th April 2011, I had written a detailed blog post / article regarding how can we test better in the Agile world. 

This post was titled - "Agile QA Process", and the document was uploaded to slideshare with the name - "Agile QA Process". I am very pleasantly surprised that till date, that document has had over 74K views and almost 2.7K downloads, and is still my topmost viewed post on slideshare.

When I look back at the document, it still seems very relevant and applicable, to me! 

What do you think?

Converting JSON into usable objects

JSON is a great way to specify data / information and, off late, it is the format of my choice to specify test data.


I find it to be -

• light weight 
• easy to understand 
• almost very intuitive to know if you have made an error in the syntax 
• easy to read into code and parse 
• easy create meaningful custom objects and use in code 

Recently, thanks to a friend - Abhijeet Vaikar, I came across a tool - quicktype.io - that helps in transforming the raw JSON (from various sources) directly into custom objects, in a variety of languages.

Site: https://quicktype.io/

The tool: https://app.quicktype.io/

I got to know about this tool at perfect time as I am building a new tool for dynamic logging in Java - AutoLogJ (but more about AutoLogJ later). quicktype.io does what it promises - and it saved me a lot of time to build the custom POJOs for the same.

Thanks Abhijeet Vaikar and the quicktype team!

A few thoughts on Test Automation

Deepanshu Agarwal and Brijesh Deb asked some very interesting questions on a LinkedIn post. Since I have some verbose thoughts on this, thought it is better to respond via a blog post instead.

• Why is Test Automation still considered suitable only for regression testing? What about writing automation tests sooner as in case of Test Driven Development?
• [Anand] - Depends what you call test automation? If ONLY FUNCTIONAL, then its better to explore the product first, investigate / have conversations with developers on what lower-level tests are already automated, and then based on cost / risk-value analysis, decide what else needs to be automated at Functional layer.
  
  
  A tangential rant ....

  The reason we think about classifications such as SMOKE, SANITY, REGRESSION in Functional Automation ONLY has a big reason. These tests are inherently very slow, brittle and it takes a lot of effort to ensure these tests give poor feedback on exact point / reason of failure. 

  
  

  I have never seen any other form of tests - say Unit tests, which would be magnitudes in number larger than the functional tests (hopefully) ever have any such classification. We all just say, the unit tests ran, not the smoke unit tests ran. 

  
  

  We need to grow up and understand the reason behind this. We need to make our top-of-the-pyramid tests as less in number as possible. We need to ensure we use good programming / development practices and get quick and reliable feedback from these tests. Else we will keep focussing on the symptoms, and never get to the root cause.

  
  

  --- Rant ends

  
  

  Once we understand this, then it is a matter of understanding in the context what can and needs to happen first, and what next. In most cases TDD will work. But TDD as a Functional Spec may, or may-not be an overkill .... the team has to decide that.

• Why do the automated tests always have to derived from manual tests?
• [Anand] - What is a manual test? Something that a machine is not performing? How do you do "manual testing"? Is Exploratory Testing subset of Manual Testing, or the other way, or any other thoughts on that?
  
  
  From the perspective of "automated tests" - I read it as "automated functional tests" here. In that case, the answer for the above question holds true here as well.
  
  
  Continuing from that thought - I think the approach (of deriving automated tests from so-called manual tests) is better than thinking upfront what tests I am going to automate and then proceed with the implementation without any thought or regard to any other learning along the way.

• The tests classified as manual tests are only focused at ensuring certain checks. What about actually running some tests to discover the unknown?
• [Anand] I don't want to get into the 'checks' debate. It is futile!
  
  
  All I have understood is - you cannot just spend time looking at the requirements / specs and write down (in your mind / bullet points / story cards / some fancy ALM tool) your test cases / scenarios. 
  
  
  That list is just a starting point of your journey of exploration and experimentation with the product-under-test. If you think that what you have identified is your actual scope of testing, then ALL THE BEST to you, your team and your product - because there are going to be so many opportunities you have missed out to make the product better and usable for the end-user. Unfortunately, lot of organisation still look for "regression" testing cycles - where (you think) you execute all the tests that were identified in a time long ago. However, everyone knows, it is best case / best effort, IF AT ALL, of actually following each and every step of that regression cycle. Such a waste of time and effort - when more meaningful testing could have been performed during that time.

• Why is that exploratory tests are still considered suitable only for manual testing? How about automating exploratory tests using AI?
• [Anand] What is the meaning of "exploration"?
  As per a quick online search, this is what it means:
  
  
  
  
  
  Now - how can you automate the unknown / unfamiliar? You can use tools to help figure out what is unknown / unfamiliar ... but once you know it, then it does not remain 'unknown'. I think buzzwords like AI and ML are tools to help bridge the gap in the known and the unknown. But we would still need to guide and use these tools and technologies to our advantage, to aid in our exploration.
  
  

Implementing Soft Assertions

Back in 2009 / 2010, I was working on implementing end-2-end tests for a web site using Java / Selenium / TestNG based automation. The challenge I was facing was that the tests used to fail for trivial (but valid) reasons - and I wondered that the test did not even get to core validations before it failed. How will the team ever know about the main issues in the product if the test fails for trivial issues? 

That was a trigger point for me to think about Soft Assertions - what if there was a way to say if there is a type of failure that I want to know about, but the test can continue with the remaining set of validations - unless something does not make sense to proceed with.

Ex: If the text message of a field is incorrect, I can continue. But if login fails, no point in proceeding with the rest of the test.

This idea seemed interesting - so I came up with the following requirements from such an  implementation as listed below:

• Clear distinction between what type of failure I can continue from, or not
• Ex: assert.** is for hard asserts. verify.** is for soft asserts
• All failures that I can continue from (i.e. soft asserts), need to be collated and at the end of the test, the complete list of those soft assert failures should be presented with the test result (and in the report), while the test failed just once
• Ex: There were 5 soft assertion failures)
• Capture relevant screenshots whenever Soft Assertion failed
• If there was a hard assert along the way of the test execution, the test failure should include the prior soft assert failures along with the hard assert failure, as appropriate

For the actual implementation, I did the following (in 2009/2010):

• I looked into the TestNG code base, and I could not really find any out-of-the-box support for what I wanted to do. 
• So for lack of knowledge on better ways of implementation, 
• I checked-out the TestNG code, 
• added the Soft Assertion implementation, and, 
• built a custom TestNG.jar file
• checked-in the jar file as a library artefact in our automation framework. 

In hindsight, I should have sent that functionality as a PR to the project. 

But not all is lost, TestNG now (or maybe since some time now) has support for Soft Assertions - out-of-the-box. And it is pretty straightforward to implement / use it as well.

Implementing Soft Assertions in your test framework

See this gist for implementation that you can you use with TestNG (I tested with v6.10).

Using Soft Assertions in your tests

Here is how you can use the Soft Assertions in your tests.

Soft Assertions in any other tech stack?

What if you are not using TestNG, or Java - rather, what if you are using completely different programming language / tools / test-runner? Can you still use Soft Assertions? 

Absolutely YES! All you need to understand is the concept, and figure out the best way to implement the same, if any out-of-the-box solution does not exist in that tech stack. 

Hope this helps you!

Essence of Testing - A new beginning

In my career so far, I have been very fortunate to have got great mentors, and a variety of opportunities to learn, add value, and share my experiences with others around me.

Here are some of these experiences:

• Worked in various sized organisations across the globe in the past couple of decades
• The teams have been big and small
• Played a variety of roles - Quality Analyst, SDET (Software Development Engineer in Test), Product Quality Engineer (PQE), Automation Engineer, Consultant, Coach, Project Manager, Director - Quality, Support Engineer, etc.
• Worked with teams having products in different domains - Health care, eCommerce, Banking / Finance, Retail, Entertainment (OTT), Research, etc. 
• With in organisations (B2B and B2C space): WebMD, Borland Software, Microsoft (Redmond, USA), AmberPoint (USA / India), ThoughtWorks, Vuclip 
• Shared experiences with other via Meetups and Conferences world-wide
• Created opensource tools like WAAT, TTA, TaaS

After working as an employee in these organisations for almost a couple of decades now, I have taken a plunge to do something different.

I am now looking forward to work with Organisations and Teams, to help co-create optimized solutions towards shipping a quality product. Leave me a message on my blog, or send me an email at abagmar@gmail.com to talk more on how we can work together!

As part of this journey, even before I was able to buy my own laptop, and warm it up, I got an interesting consulting assignment, thanks to a dear friend.

This assignment was exactly what I needed to get started - it was a Discovery Workshop, with the following objective:

• Learn and understand the current state of the team and the product they were building
• Understand current (perceived) challenges
• Suggest improvements for the team in areas of:
• Tweaks in the current processes
• Practices to be adopted / got better at / or stopped (as anti-patterns and not adding value)
• Identify opportunities to Test better, and early
• Suggest a Test Automation Pyramid that is fit-for-purpose for the team
• Suggest strategy, tools and approach for end-2-end (e2e) functional automation

As I usually do, I started off the workshop with my favorite tool for note taking - Mind Maps! As the conversations evolved and got specific, I started with a Balanced Mind-Map  to Fishbone Mind-Map.

Eventually I consolidated my thoughts and created the Discovery Workshop Report for the client in the form of a slide deck, using the following approach.

• Learning from Discovery
• Talk with the Team members
• See & understand the project management tool, quality of requirements, etc.
• See the code - understand complexity, types of tests written, quality of tests, etc.
• See the Testing related artifacts - test cases, test execution strategy, exploratory testing, etc.
• See the CI server - how deployments happen, what causes the builds to fail, etc.
• Recommendations
• For all the above areas, I created recommendations on what different aspects may help the team move ahead in a better way

Discovery and Recommendations were based on each specific activity:

• Process
• Architecture
• Requirements
• Development
• Testing
• Deployments

Once the learning from the Learning and Recommendation stages were well understood (by me), I then created a Suggested Plan of Execution (in phases / milestones)

• From the recommendations, I created milestone based plans on what can be started immediately, and what decisions the team needs to take to move forward in other areas

In this 2 week time, unknowingly, in retrospect, the whole engagement was quite agile. There were periodic demos of the POCs, regular progress sharing, and changing direction of discovery and recommendations based on learning.

The Client also appreciated the quality of conversations, and the results that were shared.

All in all, a very satisfying beginning to my new journey with Essence of Testing!