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I know DevOps is the latest and greatest way to do software development and there is a lot that I like about it, but there is a one big problem with being a DevOps team.

Interruptions.

We’ve started to learn to plan for interruptions. There are going to production issues that need to be dealt with. We are going to get client escalations. Things are going to come across our plate without any warning and we need to be able to respond to them.

The problem is interruptions keep you from getting done what you were planning to get done. Features don’t get delivered and the team can start to get frustrated. Interruptions can really make the life of a devops team get harder.

Do you know what another word for interruptions is?  Bugs.

These interruptions are coming from clients that are having issues. Sometime they are just because we have changed a workflow and they don’t understand it, but to me anything that is impacting the ability of our clients to solve their problems is a bug.  These interruptions are bugs.

So let’s rephrase that statement at the top of this article. Bugs are a big problem with being on a devops team. You know I think they are a big problem with being on any team aren’t they? So what do we do about it? Do we need to spend more time finding the bugs up front so they aren’t coming in as interruptions during the next development cycle?  Sometimes yes – but sometimes these are things we probably never would have found no matter how much time we spent on it.  So what other solutions do we have?

Well we could just account for it in our plans and add a 25% interruption buffer. This doesn’t seem to be the greatest option, but there are times when it makes sense (like when we just changed a major workflow for hundreds of clients). In general though I don’t think this is going to allow us to most effectively deliver value. So what else?

Perhaps we need to make it so that the interruptions don’t hurt as much. If we can pinpoint exactly where the problem is coming from and find the solution more quickly, interruptions becomes less painful.  This mean being committed to good telemetry and good coding practices that let you quickly and easily find issues.

This issue of interruptions and bugs is not a simple one. It is one that has been with us from many years and will be with us for many more. There isn’t just one simple, quick fix answer. I’ve shared a few ideas we’ve been using or working towards on our team.  What ideas to do you have? Share in the comments below!

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Ask my wife how forgetful I am. You’ll probably get a big sigh. Case in point; the other day we were on our way home and we were about 30 seconds away from turning onto the side street we live on. My wife said to me “don’t forget that we need to go to the grocery store.”

“Yes dear”

30 seconds later.

“Why are your turning onto our road! We need to go to the grocery store!”

Yes, I can be that forgetful. I know that I’m forgetful and so I have systems in place to help myself with this. I try to write things down and use software to remind of things when I can. I might be an extreme case, but I think we all forget stuff sometimes.  It happens in software development as well. This is why we have stories, and documentation and defects.

However, sometimes I want to forget things. Take bugs for example. Having a big bug backlog just slows us down and I don’t want to go through it every week or two and see at the things we haven’t fixed. So what can I do to make bugs more forgettable?

Well let’s consider a few ideas:

I could fix it myself. Who says only developers can fix bugs? Sometime I know how to fix it myself or can figure it out with a bit of work, so why don’t I just do that?

I could immediately work with a developer to fix it. Instead of filing a bug and sticking it in some backlog, I could chat with a developer who know that area of the code and see if we can sit down and figure out the issue and fix it on the spot.

I could work with PM to make into a story for the back log. Sometime a bug doesn’t have to be a bug and can just be prioritized with other work we are doing

I could walk away. Maybe this bug is ok to ignore.  Maybe I can just embrace my forgetfulness, look the other way, and go find something more important to fix or work on.

Of course sometimes a bug does need to be remembered, but wouldn’t it be nice to be able to forgot about them more often?

 

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I want you to think about butterflies. The beautiful feathery winged creatures that flit from one flower to another. The weather is warming up, and yesterday my son and I were marveling at the beauty of these little creatures.

Now, let’s go back a bit in the development life-cycle of a butterfly. Let’s go back to the moment a butterfly starts to emerge from the chrysalis. The story is that if you feel sorry for the butterfly and cut the chrysalis open, it won’t be able to open it’s wings.  The struggle is necessary for the blood flow. Now, as with most inspirational stories you hear, it is probably not strictly true, but I think there are still a few lessons that can be drawn from it about how to become a great tester.

Struggle is important for becoming good at your craft. You can really only learn some things through the struggle of trying to do them. Sometimes we can try to short circuit the pain of the learning process, but at the end of the day you aren’t going to be able to learn without some struggle.

This isn’t the only lesson to learn though. The other lesson we can glean comes from the fact that this story is probably not strictly true. A couple of quick google searches shows experts who say that as long as you are careful, there are ways to help a butterfly that is having trouble getting out of the cocoon. Struggle is good and helpful and shouldn’t be short circuited, but there is a time to get help.

So how do you become a great tester?

Do lots of testing and struggle through the pain of trying to figure it out. Don’t think you can just read a few blog posts and listen to few talks and then have what it takes to be a great tester. It will take time. Lots of time. It will take trying things and failing and trying again.  It will take getting stuck and getting frustrated. It will take pain and joy. It will take frustration and annoyance and aha! moments and a powerful sense of accomplishment. In the struggle you will slowly grow and become a better and better tester.

Embrace the struggle, but don’t get lost in the struggle. Don’t forget to ask for help. Find those voices that can speak to you on how to get through the struggles you face. Go to the conferences. Ask the questions. Pair up with the experienced tester. Read the books. Take the course. Get help.

Becoming a great tester takes time and persistence. It also takes help and encouragement.

Happy testing!

 

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“Now that is weird.”

I stared at my screen and puzzled over the problem. How could this happen?

It had all started with a 500 error due to a missing config. When I checked the config panel, sure enough, the config was missing. We were searching through pull requests trying to figure out what had gone wrong, when one of my co-workers said that it seemed to be there for her.

So I refreshed the page. And there it was.

How can that be? We didn’t make any code changes to the site so how can a config that wasn’t there a minute ago just appear?

But oh well right? The initial thing I was trying to do was working now, so maybe it was just some network glitch or something.  I felt the temptation to just shake my head, attribute it to the whims of the software gods, and move on. But I decided to be curious and to see if I could find out anything else.

I posted on our company’s testing slack channel asking for ideas and within minutes I had a response that led to understanding the issue. We were creating the variable too late in the process and so the site didn’t know about it the first time we tried to use it. We got a fix together and took care of the issue, but I think there are a few important lessons to learn.

Be curious – It would have been easy to shrug my shoulders and move on, but that would have led to a bunch of clients hitting weird random errors when they first started using the feature.  Not a good first impression!

It takes a team –  I might have noticed the issue, but without the help of others it would have taken a long time to understand what was going on. We can’t know everything about everything. It really does take a team to solve problems like this

Open communication – A team isn’t a team without good communication and if it wasn’t for open communication channels like Slack, it would have taken much longer to get to the bottom of an issue like this.

Intermittent bugs are still bugs –  Just because you can’t reproduce something, doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. The only way to reproduce this bug is to create a whole new site. The problem is we create hundreds of sites for clients for each release. So even though I can’t reproduce this bug (at least not without spinning up a whole new site), it would still be a high impact bug.  The more users and usage you have, the more important intermittent bugs become. Don’t just ignore them!

Did that bug really go away? Don’t assume it too quickly!

 

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Note that this is a sponsored post. Posts like this will only ever be about things that I believe and that I think you would potentially find useful. You can read about my full philosophy on sponsored posts here

I always manage to keep a full plate in life. I have many interests and responsibilities. Sometimes it can feel like life is too busy, but I really do enjoy the many different things I do. One interesting project I have been working on lately is a collaboration I have been doing with TestProject. Their goal is to provide the testing community with a community powered platform that helps with recording, developing and analyzing test automation.

I have been working with them on creating some video tutorials that explain how the tool works and highlights some of its benefits. If you want to check out some of the videos I’ve made, you can go to the TestProject page and click on the “Watch how it works” button to hear me talk about the high level overview of the product, or you can go to the videos section to find my other tutorials. There is also a YouTube playlist that has them all in one place.

As I have been putting these together, I thought I would stop and reflect a little on this process. I want to look at it from two perspectives. In the first place, I want to reflect a little bit on the tool itself and in the second place I want to talk a bit about what it has been like to work with the TestProject team

Ok. So the tool itself. I find that I learn the most about something when I teach others how to use it. In making these tutorials I have been learning a lot about TestProject and I have to say that overall I am pretty impressed by the tool. I have been making some videos, for example on the smart test recorder. UI automation is notoriously hard to do well, but I have to say that the smart test recorder really does a good job of setting you up for success. It makes creating test scripts straightforward and easy, and it also does a good job of creating the necessary levels of abstraction for you. For example it automatically saves elements for you so that you can share them between tests. It also allows you to call one test from another test, which allows you to follow the ideas of the page object model. We usually think of the page object model as something you would do in coded tests, but TestProject makes it easy to take this test design principle and put it into action in high level UI tests as well.

There are also a lot of other helpful things that TestProject does. It takes care of all the dirty work of getting the selenium and appium drivers installed and setup and is honestly the fastest and simplest way I have come across for getting you started with tools like this. I have started using TestProject to automate some of the boring things I have to do. For example, if I want to start doing some exploratory testing on a new build, I have a TestProject script I can run to setup some stuff in the way I want it to, so that I can just dive right into the part of the testing that I am currently interested in. This is something I have done with Selenium in the past, but I found it be a lot easier to get started when using TestProject.

I think this could be especially powerful if you don’t know how to code since you can use the smart test recorder to set this all up for you with very little difficulty (and without needing to know a single line of code). You can of course also use the TestProject SDK to create coded tests or even export your recorded tests to code if you wanted to dive a little deeper.

TestProject also works well for creating regression tests that you run across browsers and platforms. It instantly recognizes any devices you have attached and lets you create and run tests on applications you have on those devices as well. It also does all this in a way that is designed around collaboration. They really are seeking to provide a solution that is team based and you can see that in the way that all tests and run time environments etc. can be shared with your team.

The community driven aspect of TestProject brings me to the second point I wanted to talk about which is what it has been like working with the TestProject team. I don’t have a ton to say on this front, but I did want to mention what a great experience it has been for me. The team members I have interacted with there have really made me feel like my input and expertise is valued and important and I can see in those interactions why they have a free forever plan. They really are committed to making things better for the testing community. Just to be clear the free forever plan isn’t just a ‘give you just enough to make you want to upgrade.’ It is something that would be really valuable just on its own including things like unlimited test execution and access to all important functionality like the addons library, smart test recorder, reporting and much more. I’d encourage you to check it out and sign up.

I really think this a good tool and a welcome addition to the list of testing tools out there. It has been a lot of fun working on creating tutorials that explain what it does and I’m looking forward to continuing to learn and use this tool.

I’ve been talking about creating bug free software in my last two  posts. In this article I want to think about why we might want to do this.

Bug free software (as I have narrowly defined it in these posts), is valuable. If you can really deliver software that solves a customer problem in a way that they agree does not create any bugs, you have something that is incredibly valuable to them. However, it will most likely also be expensive. Figuring out what exactly the customer needs and working with them to deliver exactly that, is cost and time intensive. We all know that good testing takes time.

I think there is a place for dollar stores and other providers of low cost goods.  There is also a place for low cost providers of software solutions.  If all you need is a quick and dirty solution that doesn’t last long, a piece of software with a lot of issues that ‘bug’ you might be just fine. But if you are dealing with a long term and important problem that can be solved with software, do you really want a dollar store solution for it? Is it worth it to go back to the dollar store every two day to replace that broken item?  Or is it perhaps worth getting a higher quality item that will last and do exactly what you need it to?

I think this metaphor can be applied to software.  If your software solves a problem well, and does so in a way that doesn’t feel like a dollar store toy that breaks 2 minutes after your kid starts playing with it, you have something that is valuable.

When you have something that is valuable you can get people to give you money for it, and then you have a successful business. So caring about quality, and the effort that goes into it is a great way to create value for the business. Taking time to invest in good automation and learn good coding practices; taking the time to reach out to customers and understand usage patterns; taking the time to keep the code base understandable; taking the time to find and fix things that prevent customers from efficiently solving their problems; all of these things contribute to having valuable software.

I very often see companies getting caught up in the need to release new features and make more exciting stuff that they can market and sell.  Those things matter and are ways to add value and make money, but we need to remember that working on the quality of our existing solutions is also a way to add value.  The better we solve the customer’s problems that more valuable our software will be. And I think it is a pretty simple inference to say that the more valuable our software is, the more potential there is to make money.

So why create ‘bug free’ software?  Well in a nutshell, because it is valuable.

Let me close with one parting thought: How valuable would it be to the company to have someone (say a tester) that can demonstrably help them get closer to that bug free state?

 

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In my last post I proposed that it is possible to create bug free software if the context is very limited and the number of stakeholders who determine if something is buggy is small.  In the discussion on that post in various forums we fleshed out a bit more the idea that this is limited to a snapshot in time, since new context or stakeholders could change the things that are considered to be bugs.

Can this apply at scale though? If you have a large scale software product with thousands or millions of users and stakeholders can it be bug free?

I think here the answer is no. But I think it is a softer no that I would have used before

No, you can’t simultaneously satisfy the competing demands of many different customers. But there are still some powerful techniques that we can use. If we use the same definition of a bug that we did in the last post. (i.e. something that is a threat to stakeholder value), we can actually get pretty close to a bug free state. If we understand enough about what our customers value and aggressively fix things that get in the way of this, we can make very valuable products. We might not ever get to a fully bug free state, but we can get pretty close.

I guess in way what I am saying is that a 0 bug backlog way of working is a possibility. If you are willing to put in the work. They key here is understanding that a bug involves a relationship. Bugs don’t exist without people. They don’t exist if they impact something no-one cares about or uses. If we think back to that limited scope bug free project in the last post, there could be any number of things that are in there that they programmer did not intend the software to do. But if those things do not affect the stakeholder, are they really bugs? A bug isn’t a bug, until it impacts someone that matters.

Working from this, leads to an important point about being able to achieve quality at scale. We won’t get to bug free, but we can get to high quality if we focus aggressively on fixing actual bugs. A lot of times we end up working on things that we think are bugs, or things that might be bugs, but we don’t consider the relationship aspect of a bug. Who is this bug bugging? Why does it matter?

As a testing profession we have tended to focus on what I’m going to call ‘potential bugs.’ These are issues like logic errors or crashes or really anything that gets filed in a bug report, but they are found before they impact any of the stakeholders. I’m not against finding and fixing potential bugs, but we need to remember that there is importance to finding and fixing actual bugs. Bugs that are currently bugging someone, not just bugs that might bug someone if we release them. We need to find and fix things that are actually, right now, threatening the value of our product. We need to get rid of the things that are currently bugging someone. As the proverb goes, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

This also means that the goal of a nearly bug free product will lead us to prioritize the fixing of these actual bugs over creating new features. Businesses don’t always like this, especially in a highly competitive landscape where time to market for features is important, but if your goal is have a high quality product, you need to prioritize in this way.

This gets expensive. It takes time to find and fix bugs. Time that could be spent on making new features. It also add a lot of interruptions. If we prioritize fixing actual bugs over feature delivery we are going to sometime end up in a responsive mode. Remember the comments about how ‘bug free’ is a time limited snapshot? Our system and users and environments change over time and so even though we might be bug free today, that does not mean we will be so tomorrow.  Again this approach is expensive. It has real costs associated with it.

And that is what I want to talk about in the next post in this series. The interplay between the cost and value of creating ‘nearly bug free’ software. Is this cost worth it?

What do you think?  I’ll share my thoughts in the next post. Stay tuned!

 

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In a recent post to his email list, Jonathan Stark talked about giving guarantees for your work.  He gave the example of offering a “bug free” guarantee for software development work. All the testing hairs on my arm stood up and I wanted to protest that there is no such thing as bug free software!

But then I let another testing instinct kick in – curiosity.  I started thinking about how he can do this. How can he offer a guarantee that he will deliver bug free software? Is there such a thing as bug free software?

I came to a conclusion that yes there is.  There really can be bug free software.

The context for that statement has to be just right though. If you are delivering a piece of software that has only one (or a very limited number of) stakeholder that gets to decide if something is bug free, I think you can indeed make the software bug free. There might still be logic errors in the code somewhere. There might even be things that you as a tester could find that are ‘wrong.’ But if the client agrees that the software does what they need it to in a way that is reasonable for them and if they agree that there are no issues that prevent them from getting the value they need out of it, you have indeed delivered bug free software.

I think a bug is something that threatens the value of the product. If you have a limited scope product and limited number of stakeholders, you should be able to make something that has no threats to it’s value. You would need to do this through careful consultation and iteration with the customer. They would have to tell you where they are not getting the value they need and you would need to work closely with them to remove all bugs (that matter to them) from the product, but it should be possible to do.

I want to try a more difficult thought experiment though. Take this into general purpose software with many thousands or millions of users with competing demands, skill levels and expectations. In this context can you create bug free software?

I’m going to take up that thought experiment in the next post. Stay tuned!

 

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Security and data breaches are probably one of the biggest risks any product faces. One public incident can take a company down or at least have a huge impact on it’s bottom line. Not to mention what something like that does to company morale. It would follow then that security testing is very important.

However, I don’t know if you’ve looked into security testing. It is a complex and intimidating world to get into.  You need a lot of specialist knowledge and a high degree of technical competence to be an effective security or penetration tester. Not all of us have the time or inclination to learn what it takes to get into this field, but that doesn’t mean we can’t contribute to security.

Good testing leads to a more a secure product. There are many security concerns like cross site scripting or packet sniffing or SQL injection that you probably won’t find without a least some specialist knowledge, but there are many other things that contribute to security.

Understandable Code

If you have code that you can understand, it will be much easier to see possible security flaws through things like code review. Cleaner code could also make it easier for security analysis tools to find flaws and vulnerabilities.

Testing can of course contribute to understandable code. Even if you don’t know much coding you can contribute. Look at code reviews and even if you don’t know how to write code you should be able to sort of follow along with it.  If the variables, methods and classes are well named and the code is well organized you should be able to least feel like you basic grasp of what is going on.  I’m not talking about finding issues in the code review, I’m just talking about able to kind of get the gist of it. If you can’t even do that, it might be sign that the code is unnecessarily complex or that things are not well named and structured in the code.  You don’t need to be a programmer to be able to contribute to the team having understandable code

Sometimes all you need to do is ask a question.  Why do we do it this way here?  What is happening here?  You would be surprised at how simple questions like that can sometime expose unclear code and even if they don’t you’ve now learned a little more about the system you are testing and that certainly isn’t a bad thing!

Exploratory Testing

Many security breaches boil down to less technical things than something some black hat hacker does.  For example read this article about mining public passwords using google. Doing this required a very minimal amount of technical expertise in using google, and did not involve any of the highly technical things we often think of when we think of security hacking.

Finding ways that we could accidentally expose private information is a creative and exploratory exercise. These are skills every good tester has in abundance and we can use these skills to help prevent security breaches.  Think about creative ways people might accidentally use your project or about ways that people might try to get around limitation you have in place.

Good exploratory testing can expose many security flaws. Just knowing that code will be looked at with this multifaceted approach can help everyone in the development process think more carefully about those less than ideal ‘users’ that our products might have

Monitoring

There are of course many other ways that an emphasis on quality can help reduce security threats, but at the end of the day it is going to be very very hard, if not impossible, to ensure that there are no security holes anywhere. This is where monitoring comes into play. We need to think about how we would detect and quickly shut down any issues that might arise. Thinking about how things might go wrong and what kind of things we could check to know if has happened is also very much a testing activity and so here again having good testing in place on your product helps improve security.

So, don’t leave out the importance of targeted security testing on applications, but at the same time don’t forget that a big part of having a secure product is just having a good quality product and code base. Those things don’t guarantee security, but they can help improve it!

 

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