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Takeaways from the Continuous Automated Testing Tutorial at CAST2014

I had the opportunity to attend Noah Sussman's tutorial on Continuous Automated Testing last week as part of CAST2014. It was a great tutorial, with most of the morning spent on the theory and concepts behind continuous automated testing, and the afternoon spent with some hands-on exercises. I think that Noah really understands the problems associated with test automation in an agile environment, and the solutions that he presented in his tutorial show the true depth of his understanding of, and insight into, those problems. Here are some of the main highlights and takeaways that I got from his tutorial at CAST2014. Key Concepts Design Tools – QA and testing are design tools, and the purpose of software testing is to design systems that are deterministic Efficiency-to-Thoroughness-Trade-Offs – (ETTO) We do not always pick the best option, we pick the one that best meets the immediate needs Ironies of automation – Automation makes things more complex and, while tools can make

The Anomic Potential of #NoEstimates

I was looking for a bit of clarification on #NoEstimates, and I remembered reading one of Neil Killick’s posts about it that I thought would be relevant. As I was combing through his blog, looking for the post I had in mind, I stumbled across People Need Estimates . What caught my attention was not so much the title of the post, but the image of a red umbrella that went along with the post. That image of the umbrella, along with the title, had me making the connection between #NoEstimates and the work of Peter L. Berger because Berger says that society creates a sacred canopy (or umbrella) to help us relate to the world in a consistent way, and if we are forced to move from under that canopy we face chaos and fear. I began to get excited as I read the article because, whether he knew it or not, and reference to the umbrella aside, many of the points that Neil was making were resonating with what I remembered reading in Berger’s book The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociology of Reli

Book Review - The Shape of Actions: What Humans and Machines Can Do

If you’re a tester and you’ve been around social media, attended a conference, watched a webinar, read blog posts, or watched videos of other testers speaking on YouTube, you may have heard at least one mention of polimorphic and/or mimeomorphic actions. But what does it mean when someone says that an action is polimorphic or mimeomorphic? Where do these ideas come from, and why, as testers, do we care? The concepts of polimorphic and mimeomorphic actions come from the book The Shape of Actions: What Humans and Machines Can Do, by Harry Collins and Martin Kusch. In the book the authors develop a new theory about what they call the shape of actions. I’ve attempted to cover the highlights and general topics of discussion, or at least what I found most interesting, from each chapter in the summary below. Chapter 1 – Humans and Machines In Chapter 1, Collins and Kusch introduce the reader to their theory which basically states that humans can do three things – they can do polimorp

A Year in Review

The following post came to mind as I was writing my year-end self-evaluation, and provides a brief glimpse of where I started the year and how I got to where I am today.  This year has been filled with diverse challenges, including ongoing employee issues, the continued mindset of "get it out the door", another reorg of the IT department, and the real possibility of the commoditization of testing within IT. However, as is often the case, challenge spurs innovation. In preparing for working on the team's seven-year strategic plan, I stepped back from the day-to-day operations of my team, and took a critical look at the work we were doing and the services we performed. What I saw was that the testing services we were providing for the company were, in many cases, nearly indistinguishable from the testing services provided by alternative sourcing strategies, with the primary differentiator being cost, not quality. Seeing the threat of the commoditization of testing