Critical Testing Process: Plan, Prepare, Perform, Perfect

• Authors: Antony Black
• Venue: Critical Testing Process: Plan, Prepare, Perform, Perfect
• Year: 2003

From the Book:I’ve spent most of my twenty years in the software and hardware business in the arena of testing. For the first few years as a test practitioner, I struggled to keep my head above water. Ultimately, I mastered some basic tools and techniques. As I learned more about testing, I started to notice certain common themes. Some of these themes had to do with events—good and bad—that happened over and over again on software, hardware, and system projects. For some of these events, I found that some teams could create order in their projects. These teams handled these common events better than the teams that bounced from one crisis to the next, reacting constantly, immersed in chaos. The successful teams had good processes. Some of these successful project teams implemented written processes, while others accumulated “institutional knowledge” in their wise—and sometimes prematurely gray—heads. While I have nothing against a shared company culture, it’s hard to pass along the processes you’ve learned unless you write them down-whether formally or informally, as checklists. This book takes the informal road. I describe twelve specific test processes, using checklists. Each process is critical to test team success. I describe these processes in chronological order. First we plan the test activities. Next we prepare to test. After that, we perform the tests. Finally, we perfect the system under test and the testing activities themselves. Many other books have covered the topics of preparing and performing tests in great detail. My experience is that, as testers, we generally do a good job in these areas. So, instead of rehashingwhat we already know, I focus on opportunities for improvement. I devote eleven of the seventeen chapters to the topics of planning and perfecting. By far, these are the areas where we as testers have the most difficulty. This is especially true for complex and critical projects. Where will this book take you? During the early colonization of the American continent in the 1540s, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado searched the deserts of present-day Arizona and New Mexico for the Seven Cities of C'bola, including El Dorado, a city whose streets were supposedly paved with gold. Juan Ponce De Leon searched for a Fountain of Youth. In 1911, one of the first management consultants, Frederick Winslow Taylor, wrote a book called The Principles of Scientific Management. Taylor espoused the idea of the one best way—the perfect process—for each activity on an assembly line or in any other industrial enterprise. But none of these three men found streets of gold, life without death, or perfect processes. This book isn’t about Quixotic quests. There are no streets of gold that will make us effortlessly rich. We can’t side-step our human limitations. I don’t have infallible processes. As Frederick Brooks wrote in the Mythical Man-Month, Second Edition, we don’t have any silver bullets to kill our system project monsters, including the ones that live in quality and testing. That said, I have found many ways for testers to deliver valuable information and services to the project team, and each of these ways has its strong points and its weaknesses.The processes in this book might differ from what you’re doing now. In somecases you’ll decide, based on the success of your current processes, that you’re doing a fine job already. In some cases, though, you may want to implement improvements. I’ll discuss specific ways to do that, but two themes apply to process change throughout the book. First, only change what’s broken when changing it will help. Process change for its own sake, or process change to perfect an already-good process, often doesn’t help the test team or the organization. Indeed, such efforts can prove a dangerous distraction from what’s truly important. Second, change is often easiest when done in steps wherever possible. Change should be made as painless as possible. All the processes in the book were developed through incremental change as I realized that a better way of doing things would significantly increase the value my team could add, and fine-tuned my processes to achieve that. The processes in this book aren’t pie-in-the-sky theory, but rather grew out of my experiences on the ground as a practicing tester, test lead, and test manager. Your experiences and your challenges will differ from mine, so be sure to adapt my processes—or completely reinvent your own—rather than trying to put a saddle on a cow. Following good processes can liberate you from the rote aspects of certain tasks, allowing you to focus on the fun, the fascinating, and the creative. When the processes you’ve adopted no longer solve the critical problems, when they need to evolve as your situations change, when they get in the way, then it’s time to rethink how you do what you do. The processes I discuss here are lightweight checklists (things I want to remember to do), not bureaucratic regulations (things I have to do because someone told me to). I hope that this book will start you thinking about the following questions: How do we do our testing jobs every day and on every test project as best as we possibly can? How do we de-institutionalize our knowledge of how we do what we do? Even though we have varied experiences, is there a commonality of practices that we can share for critical testing processes that determine our success? This book will give you a compendium of proven testing processes to help jump-start the most critical testing process of all, the thinking process.