Speed Kills

Some of my testers have become embedded on a newly formed agile team. Its been a roller coaster ride for sure. Lots of fun, thrills and a few scary points in time where I thought for certain we were not going to make it, or we were heading in the wrong direction.
From a testing perspective, we were quietly confident. Our testing is exploratory by nature, and so it lends itself easily to being flexible and adaptable.

We’re testing before the acceptance criteria are developed by attending the workshop and asking questions about the upcoming feature, learning why its needed and what problem its trying to solve.

And when it comes to testing the feature, we all jump head first  into the deep end, swimming with long powerful strokes through the water of doubt and complexity and only surfacing for air to congratulate and high five each other on another completed testing charter.

Its been a wet wild ride, but not without some uncomfortable moments.

While we’re revelling in the warm waters of upfront information and involvement, we’ve also noticed the cooler waters of reduced timeframes. Shorter iterations has placed a lot of pressure on the testers. There’s a feeling that we’re unable to pause and reflect during our testing, the pressure to be done within the iteration lends to the temptation of minimalist testing.

We had to change something to make sure we were testing well enough.

So, we slowed down.

We made sure we spent time to think critically about our testing, coming up with test ideas, understanding what done meant, and most importantly sharing these ideas with each other (including developers).

Now we test like this:

We still jump into the deep end, splash out, learn some stuff about the product but before we continue with some serious swimming we stop and confer. We reflect on our learning so far, we discuss our ideas and how we know we are done. Only then do we continue with our swimming, our strokes confident and strong.

It's been a revelation for some testers that are new to exploratory testing. They thought the objective was to test as fast as you can without stopping for a breath.

We still have the same time pressure on us, but that stop, that moment of pause and reflection has been sufficient to gain confidence in our approach and confident in delivering the best testing that we can.