Who watches the watchmen?

12

Today’s fiercely commercial world places increasing pressure on the professional test manager to provide a complete, truthful and independent picture of the state of testing progress

In the world of independent software

verification and validation, nothing ever happens in isolation and, at times, it is all too easy to forget the critical ‘independent’ viewpoint, with the potential result that corporate reputations can be seriously tarnished.

Test effort is cumulative. But it is not until the arrival of a period of sustained business interaction that the diligence of accumulated verification ‘fact’ has the chance to dovetail with the creativity of commercial validation ‘opinion’.

Such a window affords the opportunity to combine the discipline of crafted test case execution with exploratory testing imagination.

In a waterfall-world, that occasion is usually referred to as the UAT test phase.

In an agile world, where the desire is to obtain broadest business approval across a related number of sprints, a label of UAT hardening is most often used. In such a way, the prospect of paying more than cursory lip service to individual archipelago land masses is present – an occasion to really join up the proverbial dots, so to speak.

Howsoever named, this sustained business user interaction is the first time these users will have had sight of their new functionality and also time to give it a good kicking. Here is where the most convincing evidence accrues that illustrates whether the right product is being built and if it is being built the right way. In the eyes of many, this is the most critical period of testing in an entire project.

IVOR KELLY HEAD OF TESTING & UAT CONSULTANT

Ivor Kelly has spent more than a quarter of a century in the software testing profession. These days, he derives most pleasure in helping others mature their test function and building ‘top gun’ style training solutions.

INDEPENDENT TESTING13

Left to their own separate devices, neither test verification effort nor test validation activity is likely to be as effective as when a practical, well-resourced and agreed project plan bonds them together. To realise such an objective, of course, requires early and on-going stakeholder communication to bring about that goal.

It also requires training that is timely, well organised and enjoyable. Excellence in this realm is seldom achieved by uninspired individuals who merely regurgitate slides they themselves saw for the first time a few weeks previously.

By way of illustration, one of the most effective and enjoyable training experiences that I have had the pleasure of witnessing was the education associated with a worldwide series of training workshops for a new database offering. The fellow who designed and authored that courseware did a remarkable job in creating original material that including cardboard cut-outs which, when folded origami-style (his wife is a Japanese lady), greatly assisted understanding of challenging technical topics. He had allegedly spent much time sitting on the desks of his development and sales colleagues, not going away until he obtained the information he required. Rumours also circulated that he occasionally brought his cat into work for some weekend company and inspiration and, as further testament to his character, it turned out those tales were true and the cat was called Garfield!

But, it was this same character who was a natural teacher and one that knew how to create magic in the classroom, so much so, he was earmarked for a seven-week trip to Toronto, San Francisco, Sydney, Wellington, Singapore, Amsterdam and London to deliver the material he shaped to global technical teams. Furthermore, so well was that training received, that he was persuaded to visit those locations again to deliver the same innovative material to the sales teams there. With business-class travel, naturally.

The message here is to seek out the bestof-the-best in this arena, since training is such a key enabler of every test verification and validation activity.

COLLABORATION IS KEY

Turning now to the wider world of testing and to the subject of collaborative teamwork in particular, where there is a very real and present danger.

These days the majority of senior testing vacancies emphasise the need for collaboration above pretty-much everything else. Collaboration with the development teams, collaboration with the service management function, collaboration with business users and their line management and collaboration with the technical BAU functions. Plus, collaboration with other project teams to ensure there are no nasty surprises hiding in anyone else’s woodwork, either.

Most of the time, a collaborative mentality is good testing practice. Questions are asked and answered. Problems are discussed and resolved, practical test artifacts get created and approved. Ergo, confidence grows in the ability of the entire team to create verification and validation excellence.

Every now and then, however, something rather important called ‘test independence’ gets forgotten.

In the same way that the overriding responsibility of every auditor is to form an independent opinion of the accuracy of an organisation’s accounts for its shareholders’ guidance, and every physician who is charged with upholding the Hippocratic Oath; the professional test manager is mandated with providing an independent assessment of the status of testing on behalf of project stakeholders.

One might well ask, ‘if not him or her, then who?’

Consider the hypothetical situation where a major financial institution desires to schedule significant migration activity over a particular weekend. Relevant communications go out, together with notification that certain commonly-used customer routes to affected data would be limited during the migration window. All well and good, so far.

But, let us further assume that when the anointed weekend arrives, pre-migration test activity is substantially incomplete and that this status is known to senior management.

However, the go-ahead for migration is given with the result that a multitude of serious data errors occur when subsequent access is attempted by customers using their usual access routes.

Questions would therefore have to be asked, at levels up to and including high places, to establish whether the in-house test function and their out-house advisors had been collaborating with other project team members to such a degree that they could no longer see the proverbial wood for the trees.

“Most of the time, a collaborative mentality is good testing practice. Questions are asked and answered. Problems are discussed and resolved, practical test artifacts get created and approved... Every now and then, however, something rather important called ‘test independence’ gets forgotten”