Mike Harris' Testing and Quality Blog
“Most organisations focus on the acquisition, processing of data and information….but data, information and knowledge are not all that can be learned, there is also understanding and wisdom”[1] Testers contribute to each of these types of learning. “These five types of mental content form a hierarchy of value; data have the least value, wisdom the …
Continue reading “How do testers assist organisational learning?”
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 …
Continue reading “My new guiding principles are helping me to automate tests.”
The SIGiST Summer 2024 Conference was a great success. The British Computer Society hosted the conference at its London office. We had nearly 200 delegates, which is more than at previous conferences. Over twenty speakers gave interesting and inspiring talks. It was great to have speakers for whom this was their first experience of speaking …
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 …
Continue reading “Who is responsible for quality? Is it the tester, or the team?”
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 …
Continue reading “How to help your team complete their work and so have more time for testing”
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 …
Testers can help increase cooperation across the company, and cooperation will help us and the company. Testers give feedback to developers when we test. We should also get feedback from other departments and customers on our work and the product we are testing. The feedback we get from cooperating with other departments brings the perspectives …
Continue reading “Cooperation helps to improve testing, helps testers and helps the company”
“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 …
Whichever technique is used to create tests they will contain assumptions about the nature of bugs. Each technique targets a different set of bugs. If development teams react to bug reports by fixing the bugs that have been reported and by finding and fixing similar bugs, then running the same tests is unlikely to find …
Continue reading “The Pesticide Paradox is a reason to do exploratory testing”
This book is both insightful and useful. It was recommended to me by members of the Deming Profound Book Club. Wheeler describes how to create control charts and analyse processes using control charts. This book can help you start to use control charts to analyse data from your test and development processes. Walter Shewhart invented …
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 …
Continue reading “Developing your listening skills is really useful”
What can we learn from comparing Deming’s 14 Points for Management and Crosby’s 14-Point Quality Improvement Plan? Which will help us more to improve quality? W. Edwards Deming first presented his 14 Points at a conference in 1978 in Tokyo[1] and published his 14 Points for Management in 1982[2]. Philip B. Crosby published his 14-point …
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 …
I am a lone tester and I work with two development teams. It is not possible to give both teams one hundred per cent of my time. If I don’t have a structure as to how to support both teams I can end up being pulled in multiple directions. The structure I use is that …
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 …
Continue reading “Some “new” practices are actually quite “old””
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