Ash Winter - Author of Team Guide to Software Testability

Ash Winter - Author of Team Guide to Software Testability

Nobody /really/ likes change, it's human nature. Testers have a special relationship with changing tools and techniques, they change and we tend to flounder a little and end up very nervous about our place in the new world. Continuous delivery is one such circumstance, I see and speak with many testers really struggling in this context. However, with a significant shift in outlook and a chunk of personal development, testers can excel in environments such as these. It’s time to start to get out in front of a changing world, rather than always battling to catch up.

I want to share my experience of adding value as a tester in a continuous delivery environment, what new technologies and techniques I've learned, using your Production environment as an oracle, advocating testability and most crucially, not overestimating what our testing can achieve. Testing is not the only form of feedback, it’s time to let go of some the aspects of testing we cling to.

Continuous delivery adds richness and variety to our role as testers. To me, it is a facilitator for the autonomy and respect that testers have craved for a long time, so let’s get involved.

Learning Outcomes

• Recognise common anti-patterns from testers who are struggling to adapt to continuous delivery.

• Understand the value added by the tester on a team with a continuous delivery context.

• Describe why testing alone cannot mitigate risk in low batch size and increased delivery cadence environments.

Audience

Organisations who are transforming towards a continuous delivery model. It users testers as a focus (because I am one) but it will be useful for anyone (development managers, tech leads) trying to understand where testers fit in when increasing delivery cadence with decreased batch size.

How this enables organisational sensing

Expectations of what testing alone can achieve is always too high in organisations. Plus the longer the release cadence, the more testing is relied upon to mitigate risk. I hope those in attendance will understand this challenge and realise that testing and release/deploy strategies need to complement each other.

About the speaker