Experiences at EuroSTAR 2012 (part 3)

So now my experiences at Thursday, the final day of EuroSTAR 2012. See my other posts for the Tuesday and Wednesday experiences.

What Agile Teams Can Learn From World of Warcraft – Alexandra Schladebeck

As I am a World of Warcraft (WoW) player myself and a great fan of Agile, the title alone was enough for me to decide to attend this presentation. Alexandra has done a great job in pointing out the parallels between WoW and Agile, not only the benefits, but also the pitfalls. WoW is a massive multiplayer online role-playing game. As in all role-playing games, we see different races, classes and professions for our characters. Each combination will have its own set of skills, when characters form groups to be able to complete dungeons, they need characters with different skills on board.  Sounds familiar if you think of multidisciplinary teams right?  A team of individuals working together to achieve a common goal… When we go one step bigger and we set our goal even higher, we can do raids in WoW. When we try to do such a project, we need several teams that work together.

When these WoW teams start their quests, they need to do some planning. In this process the teams need to estimate what the harder parts will be and who will be responsible for which tasks. The proper equipment for the specific quest needs to be put in place and they all need to work together. For the communication most groups use a tool named teamspeak.  However in some points WoW is easier, since we can use dragons for fast transportation and portals to get all the people easily at the same place.

The slide on what to learn was really interesting and therefore I added it to this post (click on it to see a larger version). Additional it is important to learn to do more that just your specialization. Just keep working in teams fun, this is applicable for both WoW and Agile teams. And finally learn to rely on your team, since you can’t kill the boss on your own 😉

Testing the API Behind a Mobile App – Marc van ‘t Veer

Polteq was happy enough to have my colleague Marc also selected with his presentation on testing an API. Marc used all his experience at T-Mobile to guide us through testing an API. He started off by explaining why T-Mobile wanted an API behind the mobile Apps. Since T-Mobile has a place where you as a customer can log in and see your calling and texting bundles. A lot of  independent App creators created App that allowed T-Mobile users to do this via their mobile phones by using screen scrapers to get the information to display. Whenever the App malfunctions – broken or incorrect data – the users blame T-Mobile for this. Even worse, the App creators also point a finger towards T-Mobile. So T-Mobile decided to decouple the content and make App creators use the API to get the content. This allowed T-Mobile to be more in control of the data and the meaning of the data.

So how to test an API? Marc starts off by showing us some risks involved with API’s:

• It’s impossible to know up front how the API will integrate with the external Apps
• There is a big variation in the data that will be provided by the API
• There is no full control on the end-to-end process
• The API may be used incorrectly

To be able to do early integration testing, T-Mobile used a prototype App and used dogfooding during development and system test. An adapter was created to let the API communicate with the back-end, so integration with T-Mobile’s back-end could be tested. This adapter also served the My T-Mobile pages, so the data on these pages could serve as an oracle for the data in the App. In testing they noticed that caching was not properly working. Since at first a single security key was used for all users. So when testing an API, make sure that you test with different users that have different authorizations. Another defect that showed, was that the HTTP-Statuses were not informative enough for the App. The API then was edited to supply extra information, so the application could provide the right information to its users. The T-Mobile data provided some difficulties of itself, since there are multiple types of bundles and each bundles has a maximum number of units that can be used. However the tag was used for different entities. One time it meant minutes, the other time it was a number that showed the number of text messages you had left or a combination of these two.

To test the API, the testers needed a lot more technical skills, since testing involved a lot of command line functionality. To actually test the API properly, automated regression testing in production was needed. Do not forget to apply the testing techniques that have proven to be valuable over the years in this new context.

In the end a good API was introduced, but people still see T-Mobile as responsible when an App malfunctions.

The testlab – Bart Knaack

The testlab cannot be absent in my experiences. How great is it to actually do some testing at a testing conference! In addition to the website and application testing, this year we got to play with Lego Mindstorms 😀 The first task was to find out what the provided car would do. It used a light sensor to read different colors and when it read the color it would do an action based on the color. After determining the actions that relate to the colors it was our tasks to see if these would hold. Of course there were bugs present! I don’t want to spoil the fun for future use of the Mindstorms for testlabs, so I won’t mention the bugs here. As you can see on the image, I earned the “I logged my bug in the testlab”-button. As simple as the reward seems, I made me happy and delivered a smile when I received it.

Advertisement

Experiences at EuroSTAR 2012 (part 2)

In the previous post I described my experiences at the Tuesday of EuroSTAR 2012. In this post I will continue my EuroSTAR experience with the Wednesday.

Changing Management Thinking – John Seddon

A nice quote from this talk about changing management thinking: “The primary cause of failing is management”. Managers tend to make decisions that are not in the benefit of projects. For example when you want to decrease the costs, managers start managing on costs… This actually increases the costs in most cases. However, when you manage on value, this will more often decrease the costs. A very useful story that John told us, was about chicken wings and spare ribs. Management of a large chain of restaurants decided to replace the spare ribs as a starter with chicken wings, since the chicken wing had a larger margin. Customers were disappointed and asked the waiters if they could get a small portion of ribs (still available as a main) as a starter. The waiters want to please their customers, so they say that it is possible. Then the fun part will start… The waiter needs to put the starter in the cash register and since there is no starter of spare ribs listed, they choose to file it under chicken wings. Since management reads the registers and sees that chicken wings are sold very often, they order more chicken wings for their restaurants. A fine example of failing management.

Adventures in Test Automation – Breaking the Boundaries of Regression Testing –

 John Fodeh

John provided information on automated monkey testing. The presentation was supported by using some scenes from the IT Crowd to inform us on automation.  Automated monkey testing p roved to be an easy to understand concept: by randomizing each step, you are simulating monkey testing. The problem of course is that it is easy to miss out on obvious defects, it does not effectively emulate real scenarios and debugging lng test runs can be quite a pain. They felt the need to create more intelligent monkeys by creating somewhat more expectable behavior via the use of state tables with probabilities per action.

Evolving Agile Testing – Fran O’Hara

After a short introduction on Agile and SCRUM, Fran started off on requirements. When we start to talk about user stories, we should try to find out about acceptance criteria for the story. This serves several goals:

• Define the boundaries for a user story/feature
• Help the product owner to find out what it is that delivers value
• Help the team gain understanding of the story
• Help developers and testers to derive tests
• Help developers when to stop adding functionality to a story

Fran reminds us to keep these acceptance criteria at a relatively high level, so do not lose yourself in too much details. Detailing will be done in e.g wireframes, mockups or validation rules. Another place where we find detailing is in the automated acceptance tests. Try to find examples that support your acceptance criteria.

Next Fran stresses the fact that we still need test strategy in Agile. We need to think about the minimal tests in the sprints (automated unit, automated acceptance, manual exploratory) a

nd sometimes need to do some additional testing e.g for non-functionals, feature integration or business processes. The testers themselves need to have broad knowledge (more than just testing) and deep knowledge in testing. This requires a ‘technical awareness’.

Testing of Cloud Services; The Approach: From Risks to Test Measures – Kees Blokland & Jeroen Mengerink

Kees and myself presented Cloutest® our approach to testing cloud services. We started off with an introduction to cloud computing to set the context. To properly introduce the concept, we decided to use the definition provided by NIST. After this into our approach. We identified 143 risks that arise when using cloud computing and grouped these risks into categories:

• Performance
• Security
• Availability & Continuity
• Functionality
• Manageability
• Legislation & Regulations
• Suppliers & Outsourcing

Since 143 risks is quite a lot, we decided to give a limited set of examples of risks and detail these. For instance there occurs a performance risk, since a cloud service usually has several customers. So it’s not only you as a customer that is putting load on the service, but also other users of other customers. This will influence the performance of the service. Imagine your webshop hosted at the same hosting provider that hosts WikiLeaks… The huge amounts of traffic that a new publication on WikiLeaks will generate, might result in your webshop not being available due to performance problems of the service.

With testing we provide methods to mitigate risks, so that is what we did too. The good news is that we can still use a lot of what we have learned over the years. Some techniques need to be tweaked to fit in the cloud context, but they are very useful. Next to the tweaked measures, we also describe some new measures that we have used at our clients. We grouped the measures too:

• Selection
• Performance
• Security
• Manageability
• Availability & Continuity
• Functional
• Migration
• Legislation & Regulations
• Production

How to test the scalability of a cloud service??? Providers promise scalable services and customers pay per use, so if you need more, you will get more. With traditional load testing, we can gradually increase the load and see how the system responds. This can be applied to the service too, but it will scale. You will see the point where the scaling starts in your response times, they will drop when more performance is added at the service. Check around the boundary of the scaling point to see if the billing is also scaled.

We see that test starts earlier, the scope is wider and testing will not stop in production.

Inspirational Talk: Sky is not the limit: Copenhagen Suborbitals – Peter Madsen

The inspirational talk was very nice, however not very test related. It showed us that with the right vision and perseverance you can reach goals that seem to be unreachable. Peter showed us how he built a homemade submarine and a homemade rocket.

Experiences at EuroSTAR 2012 (part 1)

Since Kees Blokland and I got selected for EuroSTAR 2012 with our presentation on Cloutest by Polteq, this was my second EuroSTAR and it was a nice experience. Next to the presentations I met a lot of friends and other interesting people. Since I seem to be unable to read all my notes, not all presentations I visited will have a substantive report.

Test innovation for Everyone – Alan Page

The first keynote! Since innovation starts with generating ideas and combining these ideas to make something new, testers are really fit for this job. So why do we start to innovate… mostly to solve a problem.  You usually start to think about how to solve the problem, but are we solving the right problem? Make sure to try a lot, but keep realizing if you are doing the right thing.

Testing Spreadsheets – Felienne Hermans

Since I know Felienne, but hadn’t seen her in years I really enjoyed seeing her as a speaker at the conference. She started of by giving us some facts on spreadsheets:

• 95% of all U.S. firms use spreadsheets for financial reporting
• 90% of all analysts in industry perform calculations in spreadsheets
• 50% of the spreadsheets is used to make important decisions

After knowing these facts, start realizing that spreadsheets are almost never tested… Looking at some spreadsheets, you can notice that testing spreadsheets can prove to be quite difficult. Lots of the formulas in the sheets are too complex to evaluate, some contain fixed number that can mean anything and of course a lot of assumptions exist in the formulas. So when we test spreadsheets we should focus on these risks! Testing the functions can visualized by using guards and/or conditional formatting. When doing this, make sure you know what you are doing and that you use the right visualization.

Unconventional influences – Alan Richardson

My notes on this presentation seem to be a bit blurry, but that might be my conventional way to capture the unconventional influences. Two statements in my notes are ghosthunting and e-prime. Okay, that unconventional indeed… The influence of ghosthunting (as I recall it) was the use of several independent observers. These observers need to match their observations with each other and in this process they can find either explanations for their observations or anomalies. E-prime is helpful when we need to report on our observations.  It makes the observations less biased, by not using the verb are. The statement might become harder to read, but at least we will have to think a lot about what we really mean to say. This encourages not to use definitions, but always provide the context. Make it simple and explain what you mean.

Test conferences

The number of events that deal with software testing seem to increase. This globalisation is great news for the testing community! More and more opportunities to share knowledge and learn from others. Last year my presentation on how to test mobile apps got to several stages and this year the release of the book Cloutest provides some opportunities for presentation slots. A presentation on Cloutest has been accepted for EuroStar and for ChinaTest. Maybe some more events will follow.

Next to Cloutest, my stage appearances will focus around Agile. China is starting to go Agile and ChinaTest has accepted two Agile proposals next to my Cloutest presentation. These will deal on how to work as a tester in Agile teams and how to improve testing in Agile settings.  The Testnet fall event also focuses on Agile, the proposal that got accepted for Testnet deals with Agile and outsourcing.

It’s great to have a lot of proposals accepted, now to prepare each presentation! For the Agile part, there are some basics that need to be dealt with in all the presentations, so let’s think about reusability 🙂 Working at Polteq provides a great setting to discuss about several testing topics. It’s great to get a lot of support and help. For Agile we recently started a discussion group, helping to see common problems and different solutions in Agile settings. Every meeting is an eye opener for me and I hope we will have a lot of informative meetings to come.

Monitor or test?

The webinar that Ruud Teunissen presented was based on the architecture of Cloutest. It was great to hear how Ruud told about the approach! I feel very proud to have contributed to this approach and to be one of the authors of the book. The cloud is hot, which was proven by the large number of questions that was asked at the end of the webinar. I want to compliment Ruud with how he handled the questions! As the result of this webinar, I hope that people realise that testing really needs to adapt to the way that software is used nowadays. Much uncertainty is introduced with the use of cloud computing, but by selecting the right service and supplier you can allready mitigate a lot of risks. Don’t forget to keep testing in production, to check if “everything still works”. One of the questions mentioned that this is monitoring and not testing. I think we need to broaden our definition of testing and make monitoring a part of testing. Realise yourself that the maintenance department might not monitor on the service, since it is maintained by the supplier… I think what needs to be done in production is testing! A continuous end-to-end test to check if the processes still work, is that monitoring or testing? Doesn’t the word test in E2E test imply a testing activity?

Edit: This topic is also active at the Cloutest site.