Essence of Testing: essenceoftesting

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Wednesday, November 28, 2018

A blog about my blog

With the risk of this ending up becoming a recursion, I want to share interesting statistics about my blog - essenceoftesting.blogspot.com and content shared on my SlideShare account.

First blog: Future of Test Automation Tools & Infrastructure, published on 25th Aug 2010
Number of blogs published: 218, not counting this one
Number of viewers: 400K+

Here are some charts from Analytics of my SlideShare and blog:

Blog Overview:

Audience:

Referrers:

Tuesday, September 11, 2018

Testing in the Agile World

Thanks to ThoughtWorks, I was introduced to many things -

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?

Monday, April 16, 2018

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!