Sometimes testers are asked ‘why does testing take so long?’ The question should not make testers feel defensive. We should always be looking to improve our test process. Testers can use a technique from Toyota to answer the question and improve our process. Testers want their testing to flow easily from one task to the …
Category Archives: Lean and Agile
My new guiding principles are helping me to automate tests.
It is useful to have guiding principles on how to be a good employee, teammate and tester. I work in teams that describe themselves as lean or agile and so I am interested in learning what lean and agile are. Learning about how lean and agile came about helps me understand them. John Willis has …
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Whoever you are, whatever you have achieved you should recognise the achievements of others
Dr Joseph Juran rose from poverty to be an internationally respected management consultant who specialised in quality. His work included popularising the use of the Pareto Principle and creating The Juran Trilogy. Juran focussed on the role of management in quality. He wrote and contributed to many books including six volumes of Juran’s Quality Handbook. …
Who is responsible for quality? Is it the tester, or the team?
I have been reading John A. Dues’ new book Win-Win W. Edwards Deming, the System of Profound Knowledge, and the Science of Improving Schools with the Deming Profound Book Club. John Dues uses an equation to describe who is responsible for student performance[1]. This equation works as a useful analogy to describe who is responsible …
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How to help your team complete their work and so have more time for testing
Testing can be hard, particularly when time is short because the team has a tight schedule. While working with Rob Falla I learned to use Critical Path Analysis to help my team deliver work on time, which helped me have more time for testing. Sometimes it is hard to complete the work that a team …
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How long will that test automation take?
Sometimes testers are asked how long it will take to automate a batch of tests. Planning how long your test automation should be simple, however, the plan will have missed some requirements. There are three types of requirements[1]: “We will never understand all the requirements of a story ahead of time”[2], this applies to test …
It is better if we build quality into the product instead of trying to test quality in
“Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place.” [1] is one of W. Edwards Deming’s 14 Points for Management. Inspection can be defined as testing after development has been completed. Some people have interpreted Deming’s point as …
Developing your listening skills is really useful
We all know that speaking up and getting your point over at a meeting is important. However, I am sure that we have all taken part in meetings when everyone is so keen to speak that we do not listen to one another. It is not only important to speak, it is also important to …
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A review of “Deming’s Journey to Profound Knowledge” by John “Botchagalupe” Willis with Derek Lewis
W. Edwards Deming is often referred to as the “grandfather of quality”, and this new well-researched book about him and his philosophy gives us many new and useful insights. The book’s author, John Willis, is one of the people who created DevOps, and he says that to understand the roots of DevOps you need to …
Some “new” practices are actually quite “old”
Recently I was fortunate to visit the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. The Henry Crown Space Center in the museum has the Aurora 7 capsule from NASA’s Project Mercury. It was piloted by Scott Carpenter and orbited the Earth in 1962. The capsule is only two meters long. It was a surprise to …
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The Seedbed of a Quality Revolution
A tester’s role is not only to do the testing but also to improve quality. I visited the site of the former Hawthorne Works during a recent trip to Chicago because so many innovations in quality started there. The Hawthorne Works was the Bell Telephone Laboratories site that manufactured the hardware for the first national …
Why we should work in small batches – a story from Japan
“The ability to work and deliver in small batches is especially important” [1], which is why many development teams work in small batches. Scrum teams work in small batches by limiting the work they plan to do in a sprint. Kanban teams work in small batches by limiting the work in progress. Working in small …
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First Thoughts on a System of Profound Testing
W. Edwards Demings’s System of Profound Knowledge (SoPK) is a valuable framework for leadership. SoPK provides a view, which Deming called a lens, “by which to understand the organisations we work in”[1]. The SoPK is “a framework for applying best efforts to the right tasks”[2]. There are four parts to the SoPK: The theory that …
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A review of “Total Quality Control – the Japanese Way” by Kaoru Ishikawa
Kaoru Ishikawa was a significant figure in the development of quality in Japan. In his book Total Quality Control – The Japanese Way he describes many of the ways that Japanese businesses achieve quality. His book contains many points that are useful to testing professionals. He wrote that the very essence of Total Quality Control …
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Definitions of Done, Team Agreements, Ways of Working and Checklists have so much in common
Many teams, create a definition of done to clarify what putting a card in the Done column on a scrum or kanban board means. A good number of teams also have team agreements or ‘ways of working’ which define ways in which the teams work. Also, some teams have checklists of items that need to …
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