Episode 8: The Liberated Tester’s Mindset with Gunesh Patil

09/27/23 • 45 min

Welcome to episode 8 of Inside The Outer Loop, hosted by by Curiosity Software's Huw Price and Rich Jordan! In this follow-up episode with Gunesh Patil, The Liberated Tester, Rich and Gunesh share their insights into what it means to be a liberated tester and how they approached the adoption of agile methodologies! Rich and Gunesh propose the idea of using squads, working to a blank canvas, can obtain a better level of DevOps and agile ways of working. However, a lack of focus on spinning up teams to do integration testing ahead of bulky end-to-end testing, may lead organisations into a blinkered cargo cult way of working. The cargo cult way of working adds difficulty to sustaining a bi-weekly change cadence, by injected chaos in the system with every incremental change. In terms of toolsets and architecture, a blank canvas helps squads see what’s not working and thus the challenges to face into. Gunesh suggests that emphasis needs to be on what’s possible to build rather than on the toolsets alone for avoiding sprints defaulting to mini waterfalls. This holistic approach enables stakeholders are to see and communicate requirements but also data dependencies. At a high level, this boosts the success rate of a test strategy, as many angles will have already been considered, providing an outcome of good documentation rather than a reliance on head knowledge. In part, model-based testing gets teams making use of this documentation for initial component level testing. This leads to heightened collaboration between stakeholders. With model-based testing, stakeholders are given the power to easily execute and comment on a system’s architecture at various stages, but also on the technical aspects of components. Isolation and integration can then be explored more freely with bulky end-to-end tests. This leads to a massive gain in time, quality and DevOps speed, and in turn, experimentation and feedback become standard and shared practice between test teams and stakeholders. Inside the outer loop – brought to you by the Curiosity Software team! Together with industry leaders and experts, we uncover actionable strategies to navigate the outer loop of software delivery, streamline test data management, and elevate software quality. Tune in to transform the way you think about software delivery, quality, and productivity!

Previous Episode

Episode 7: The Model-Based Tester’s Journey with Gunesh Patil

Guest Gunesh Patil shares insights on his journey beyond the misunderstandings and misconceptions in Model-Based Testing alongside Curiosity Software's Rich Jordan! Rich and Gunesh previously worked together on major SI projects managing transformational change of a disparate systems in a medium-sized organisation. They championed this as Data Automation and Virtual Environments - so, DAVe Ops for their own version release and change management. DAVe Ops helped spotlight how a shared understanding of a system’s architecture, or lack of, affects good software testing. Circa 2010, Rich illustrates this as an anti-pattern where automation teams were stepping in to help test teams run test cases in bulky end-to-ends. This was in response to automation test cases failing. A fail isn’t due to the automation but more to a lack of shared understanding of the consumable breakpoints in system’s architecture. For stakeholders with short-term sights on improved automation, this omits the benefits of the ‘how you get there' approach of Model-Based Testing. It’ll deal less with blackbox, instead observes sustainable metrics such as risk, response times, payloads, ie impact analysis. For Gunesh this visual and flow based production of reusable components is actually a driving force in efficiency. The need for a siloed back-and-forth of translating business requirements into test cases gets reduced. An operational win for service isolation and test matching. Sketching a practical middleware/automation test strategy comes only by listening to the expectations of designers, developers but also seasoned ancillary actors in the CICD pipeline. This ensures constraints and breakpoints are identified, and which anticipates and avoids introducing accidental complexity in a SUT. The outcome is costly and time consuming data overlaps in automation are avoided. Operationally, test matching, along with getting and allocating data formalises thinking whilst paying down technical debt. The main takeaway is that collective analysis makes software testing more integrated across teams, giving opportunity to create a strategy factoring in isolation breakpoints. So, don’t just do, also pose questions to tackle organisational but also technical inconsistency and intractability. Inside the outer loop – brought to you by the Curiosity Software team! Together with industry leaders and experts, we uncover actionable strategies to navigate the outer loop of software delivery, streamline test data management, and elevate software quality. Tune in to transform the way you think about software delivery, quality, and productivity!

Next Episode

Episode 9: Transforming Large Organisations with Chris Rowett

Welcome to episode 9 of Inside The Outer Loop, hosted by Curiosity Software's Huw Price and Rich Jordan! In this episode, our hosts are joined by Chris Rowett, DevOps & Digital Transformation Leader, together they explore the challenges associated with bringing change to large organisations! Organisational change is painful and disruptive, it can change roles and cause concern amongst teams, so in terms of value and results, a good and compelling reason is needed to entice change. In conversation with DevOps and Digital Transformation leader Chris Rowett, Curiosity Software’s Huw Price and Rich Jordan look at factors around success metrics, and how they impact quality processes in an organisation’s software release cycle. In terms of building momentum for transformation, how do you get 60% of the organisation aligned for that push towards crossing the chasm? Test transformations that are delivered top down, translate to increased automation and cost-cutting, but how you get there? That is the challenge. Transformation should come through understanding coverage, stability, repeatability, this will help your organisation make better business decisions and encourage change. The challenge then is to update metrics to enable organisational agility. Huw Price calls this ‘quantifiable testability’, so measuring how easy something is to test, and not code quality itself. For Rich Jordan, the concern for updating metrics is that, if over a 15-20 year span within the industry only around 15-20% of tests are automated, we’re missing something. Data on failure should in fact educate the business in understanding how to handle complexity. Is your organisational design sufficiently enabling business owners and IT to communicate? For instance, we need better attention on aligning the business service with the mechanisms in IT to enable netter communication. This translates to organisational refactoring, which in turn pays off technical debt. Otherwise, against your competitors, either through release of a poor product, or risk of regulatory fines, through slow compliance, you risk reputational and monetary damage. The Curiosity Software Podcast featuring Huw Price and Rich Jordan! Together, they share their insight and expertise in driving software design and development in test. Learn how you can improve your journey to quality software delivery, by considering how much do you really understand about your systems, and when things inevitably go wrong, why didn’t you test that? Inside the outer loop – brought to you by the Curiosity Software team! Together with industry leaders and experts, we uncover actionable strategies to navigate the outer loop of software delivery, streamline test data management, and elevate software quality. Tune in to transform the way you think about software delivery, quality, and productivity!