Book review, The A word by Alan Page

 
Alan "Angryweasel" Page published a book some months ago about software testing automation, you can find the book here at leanpub and even that you can download it for free, you can also pay something for it as the incomes will go to the American cancer society.

In my case, I though that the price of a couple of beers was good enough, but after reading the book twice, I think it went a bit cheap for my side.
 
What is the book like... it's a tiny 58 page book that can be read in two hours if you feel like doing so. It is written in plain English with articles extracted from his blog that have been edited and updated.
 
What can you get out of it... some simple ideas about automated test design and that you should automate all of what you should automate, understanding how your automated test suite smells, and things to consider when doing test design.
 
Who should read this book... if you know what automated software testing is about, if you think you know what automated software testing is about, or if you don't know what is the difference between these two, you should read the book.
 
Some quotes I liked:
 
"Good testers test first – or at the very least they think of tests first. I think great testers (or at least the testers I consider great) first think about how they’re going to approach a testing problem, then figure out what’s suitable for automation, and what’s not suitable. I say that like it’s easy – it’s not."
 
"As software testers, our job is to test software. That probably sounds stupid (it sounds stupid to me as I type it), but test automation is just one tool from our tester toolbox that we can use to solve a specific set of testing problems."
 
"When designing tests, it’s important to think about how automation can (or won’t) make the testing more efficient."
 
"Designing good tests is one of the hardest tasks in software development. That’s worth saying again."
 
"Your job as a tester is to test software and not to create the largest test suite known to humankind."
 
"Automation is overused and overvalued in software – while the coding of diagnostic and analysis tools is extremely undervalued."

The very first day this book came out +Michael Larsen blogged the full book review on his blog, just three hours later, in the fastest book review I've ever seen, but just as Mr Miagi did not ask Daniel-san to use a waxing machine, I still feel like trying my own review.
 

The trip to Brighton

I just went to Brighton to meet Michael Bolton and his one day Rapid Software Testing for Managers training course, Let me tell you how this happened.

Back in August I was thinking about getting to Eurostar, you know, Europe's most important testing conference, this years programme is impressive, but important and expensive have quite similar meanings.

As I have a budget with a limit, I found out that the whole conference was quite too much for me, but maybe I could go to the tutorials, after all, James Bach was going to talk about Rapid Test Management And Pradeep Soundararajan was going to talk about Context Driven Mind Mapping, exciting tutorials, just a bit important for me.

But then I had to get there, and here I found another learning, that the world is divided in levels of travel expenses.
The first level, is where I can get by train or by a single low cost air ticket, so, since I live in Valencia (Spain), cities like Barcelona, Madrid, Malta, London, Paris… are places that are easy to get there.
Next level is where I need to get two low cost air tickets, and flying to Gothemburg was on the next lever, then book some hotel room and plan some cash for expenses as lunch and dinner… It could not be done.

Then Rosie published at The Ministry a training course, in Brighton, with Michael Bolton about Rapid Software Testing for Managers in one day for 200 GBP, it sounded quite similar to the tutorial James Bach was going to give, it might not be the same, but it was affordable, so there I went.

At the end, for the price of a low cost flight and a comfy hotel room for two nights, I got the chance to meet Michael and to know Rosie, Richard, Stephen and many other testers that got to the same place. 

We talked about testing, bugs, estimations, relationships, the reality steamroller, estimations, management, lack of management, lazy developers, estimations again, testers education, hiring testers, broken systems that works for somebody, Jerry Weinberg, more about estimations, the three reasons you need to justify bullshit, the testing vortex, how to write test reports, what a testing career looks like… and as it happens, things that were talked made me think about how I am delivering my work and how I can do better.

After the training we went to a pub for some beers, and after some talk and more beers I consider that it was good enough for me and headed back to the Hotel.

I see bugs...

I think the way to get out of Zombieland is by letting you curiosity grow and getting trained, and while some trainings are too important to get there, this does not mean that there is no way, people like Rosie are organizing small events like this one, and I feel proud of being able to join and support such initiatives.

Now I am thinking in a way to meet Pradeep... So, what's your plan?

Tester in the kitchen

So, it happens that the Software Testing Club is offering you a free ticket to Eurostar. All you need to do is publish a selfie foto and send the link to the STC, and then wait for things to happen.

This is my chance to get the price.

This is my in my nightly workplace, during the day we call it kitchen, but since we have 3 small kids around, the quietness that we enjoy once they are asleep is priceless, so this spot is perfect to not wake someone up.

Also, the fridge is really close!

18 Sep. Small update: The pic got it´s way and it is one of the chosen for the final run at ministry of testing ... So much fun!

17 Oct. Small update: Michael Herrman finally got the ticket, congratulations man, have a fun time and write a proper blog post :)

Family (test) trip to Konstanz.

This summer we hit the road to do some test driving, here is the story about how it went and how it looked like from my testers perspective.

Understand your mission.
I was born in Denmark and spent there my early childhood, because of this, one year of these we want to do a long travel to Denmark in order to show the kids the places where I grew up, but since that is a 2500km trip we liked the idea about doing some test first, So we decided to do a 2/3 scale trip and visit the city of Konstanz in Germany.

Success Criteria.
All 5 family members must return home, at the same time and without any injury.
The car must also make it back home.
The travel expenses had to fit in the budget.
We should all have a good time together.
We should reach our destination.
We should get home at the expected date.
Note that the three first are fixed conditions easy to verify, while the last three are optionals or subjective items, nice to haves but not a requirement.

Plan before you test.
Before we depart, we had a lot of things we should take care of, as checking car stuff, having the needed documentation, hotel reservations... so I did a mindmap where I could update the different items as long as they where completed.

Check your tools.
I updated the GPS map, wrote down the trip on a handy device, downloaded some country music, checked the tire levels (also the spare tire), got a travel fridge, enough water for half way, some books for the kids to read.

Test early.
We planned about starting the trip Saturday morning, but as the previous Friday we had everything packed up, we decided to trade a evening in Valencia for a visit to Avignon. So we booked a cheap hotel in Barcelona and started our journey as soon as we could.

Know your stakeholders.
Because this trip was a family thing, we decided that every day we would see something nice for adults and something fun for the kids, so we went to museums and parks, at least one per day, and by doing this, we all got a nice experience out from the trip.

Change your plan if you feel like.
Once we arrived, it turned out that the information about places to visit that I found on the internet was not exactly the same that we found at the tourist info at Konstanz train station, so we decided to change some items, and we did not go to the Fussen Castle, but we went to the Dornier Museum instead, we also visited Kreuzlingen even that it was not on our initial plans, but the info lady told us that the park over there would be something for the kids to see... and man, she was right, they know how to maintain public parks for small children in Switzerland, and now I know this.
Also, our visit to the Rheinfall turned out to be shorter than expected, as the kids interest on a huge waterfall quickly dropped after 10 min of watching a river, so we spent a longer evening at the Allensback park.

At the end, we visited Avignon, Konstanz, Friedrichshafen, Rheinfall, Kreuzlingen and the Bondesee arounds, we drove about 2300km and we got back home the next Friday, safe and sound and thinking on our next travel.

What have we learnt out from this.
You got to choose how to travel, as you choose how to test.
Either you make a lot of kilometres or you visit some place, but you can't do both on the same day. For us, if we drove 400km then we still had time to spend the evening and see some place, but if we planned 700km for the day, then we would just have time for a bath and then dinner and then bedtime.

It comes with a price.
Whenever you decide to travel, you need some time and some budget to spend, once you got both, you can decide if you want to take a plane, a train, or drive your own car. In some way, when we automate stuff it becomes like flying, where we go from point A to B but we don't really know much about what is in between, but if we want to arrive to somewhere in a short amount of time, then manually driving do not seem to be the best way.

Is it worth?
Yes, both travelling and testing gives you a insight about how is the world around and how does the application work, and if you think it might be expensive, well, then think about the costs of not doing it.