Showing posts with label agiletesting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label agiletesting. Show all posts

Monday, June 3, 2019

Visual Validation - The Missing Tip of the Automation Pyramid at QuaNTA NXT at Globant

I spoke about Visual Validation - The Missing Tip of the Automation Pyramid at QuaNTA NXT event organised by Globant India Pvt. Ltd.




The event was very well organised and I had the opportunity to interact with a full house, and also later meet and talk with a lot of interesting people - curious about current state of testing, test automation and how AI can impact it in the future.

Agenda:



Below is the abstract of my talk:

The Test Automation Pyramid is not a new concept. While Automation helps validate functionality of your product, the look & feel / user-experience (UX) validation is still mostly manual.

With everyone wanting to be Agile, doing quick releases, this look & feel / UX validation becomes the bottleneck, and also is a very error-prone activity which causes brand, revenue and leads diluting your user-base.

In this session, we will explore why Automated Visual Validation is now essential in your Automation Strategy and also look at how an AI-powered tool - Applitools Eyes, can solve this problem.


Recording from the talk:




Some pictures:






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Friday, November 30, 2018

Recording from webinar on The Missing Feedback Loop now available

On 21st Nov, TestCraft.io hosted me in a webinar where I spoke about - "The Missing Feedback Loop - The Tools, Techniques, and Automation to Solve It". 

You can get the recording from here (https://hubs.ly/H0fBDN50).






Friday, October 26, 2018

Agile Testing, Analytics Testing and Measuring Consumer Quality from Poland and USA

The last few weeks have been very hectic for me. In between my consulting assignments, I traveled to Krakow, Poland for Agile & Automation Days 2018, and then to Arlington, Virginia in USA for STPCon Fall 2018.

In the Agile & Automation Days 2018 conference, I spoke about "Measuring Consumer Quality - The Missing Feedback Loop" and conducted a 1/2 day workshop on "Analytics Rebooted - A Workshop".

In STPCon Fall 2018, I conducted 2 workshops - 1/2 day each - "Practical Agile Testing Workshop" and "Analytics Rebooted - A Workshop" and also spoke about "Measuring Consumer Quality - The Missing Feedback Loop"

Overall, I had a very good trip, amazing conversations and interactions with the attendees and the speakers. I would be lying if I say I am not tired and my throat has gone sore. But, would I do this again? Absolutely! Going to conferences and meeting people, sharing my experiences with them, and learning from their experiences gives me a lot of happiness and satisfaction.

Below are the abstracts of the workshops and the talk. 

Contact me via LinkedIn, or twitter, or my site - essenceoftesting.com if you need any additional information, or if you want help in learning / implementing these or other topics related to Quality / Testing / Automation.



Practical Agile Testing Workshop

Workshop Description:

The Agile Manifesto was published in 2001. It took the software industry a good few years to truly understand what the manifesto means, and the principles behind it. However, choosing and implementing the right set of practices to get the true value from working the Agile way has been the biggest challenge for most!

While Agile is now mainstream, and as we get better at the development practices to “being Agile”, Testing has still been lagging behind in most cases. A lot of teams are still working in the staggered fashion (a.k.a. Iterative waterfall way of working). Here teams may be testing after development completes, or Automation is done in the next Iteration / Sprint, etc.

In this workshop, we will learn and share various principles and practices which teams should adopt to be successful in testing (in-cycle) in Agile projects.

Workshop Agenda:
  • What is Agile testing? - Learn what does it mean to Test on Agile Projects
  • Effective strategies for Distributed Testing - Learn practices that help bridge the Distributed Testing gap!
  • Test Automation in Agile Projects - Why? What? How? - Why is Test Automation important, and how do we implement a good, robust, scalable and maintainable Test Automation framework!
  • Build the "right" regression suite using Behavior Driven Testing (BDT) - Behavior Driven Testing (BDT) is an evolved way of thinking about Testing. It helps in identifying the 'correct' scenarios, in form of user journeys, to build a good and effective (manual & automation) regression suite that validates the Business Goals. 
Key learning for participants in this workshop:
  • Understand the Agile Testing Manifesto.
  • Learn the essential Testing practices and activities essential for teams to adopt to work in Agile way of working.
  • Discover techniques to do effective testing in distributed teams.
  • Find out how Automation plays a crucial role in Agile projects.
  • Learn how to build a good, robust, scalable and maintainable Functional Automation framework.
  • Learn, by practice, how to identify the right types of tests to automate as UI functional tests - to get quick and effective feedback.




Analytics Rebooted – A Workshop

Workshop Description:

I have come across some extreme examples of Business / Organizations who have all their eggs in one basket - in terms of # understand their Consumers (engagement / usage / patterns / etc.), # understand usage of product features, and, # do all revenue-related book-keeping

This is all done purely on Analytics! Hence, to say “Business runs on Analytics, and it may be OK for some product / user features to not work correctly, but Analytics should always work” - is not a myth!

What this means is Analytics is more important now, than before.

In this workshop, we will not assume anything. We will discuss and learn by example and practice, the following:
  • How does Analytics works (for Web & Mobile)? 
  • Test Analytics manually in different ways 
  • Test Analytics via the final reports
  • Why some Automation strategies will work, and some WILL NOT WORK (based on my experience)!
  • We will see demo of the Automation running for the same.
  • Time permitting, we will setup running some Automation scripts on your machine to validate the same



Measuring Consumer Quality – The Missing Feedback Loop

Session Description:

How to build a good quality product is not a new topic. Proper usage of methodologies, processes, practices, collaboration techniques can yield amazing results for the team, the organization, and for the end-users of your product.

While there is a lot of emphasis on the processes and practices side, one aspect that is still spoken about “loosely” - is the feedback loop from your end-users to making better decisions.

SO, what is this feedback loop? Is it a myth? How do you measure it? Is there a “magic” formula to understand this data received? How to you add value to your product using this data?

In this interactive session, we will use a case study of a B2C entertainment-domain product (having millions of consumers) as an example to understand and also answer the following questions:
  • The importance of knowing your Consumers
  • How do you know your product is working well?
  • How do you know your Consumers are engaged with your product?
  • Can you draw inferences and patterns from the data to reach of point of being able to make predictions on Consumer behavior, before making any code change?

Attendees will have deeper understanding and appreciation of the following:
  • What is Consumer Quality and how does it help shape your business!
  • Ways to measure Consumer Quality
  • Why is understanding Consumer Engagement vital to the success of your product


Friday, October 12, 2018

Conference season here is - talks, workshops, travelling, networking!

September & October 2018 is a busy conference season for me.

On 27th September, I played a game - "Collaboration - A Taboo!" at ATA GTR 2018 with an audience of 100+ people. There was absolute chaos in the game - a lot of it self-inflicted ... and thankfully - exactly was I wanted it to be. So much fun, energy and enthusiasm in the room meant there was no one feeling drowsy in the post lunch session! 

Typically I play this game in 45-min to 1 hour duration. At ATA GTR 2018 though, I had only 30 min to play the game, and add my own twist on top of it. But, never have I ever taken more than the allocated time - and I managed to get the objectives of the game achieved as well in these 30 min.

Below are some pictures from the game.




Then on 28th September, I spoke on "Measuring Consumer Quality - The Missing Feedback Loop" at StepIn's PSTC 2018. Slides from that talk can be found here.

In October, I will be off to Agile & Automation Days in Krakow, Poland. Here I will be speaking about "Measuring Consumer Quality - The Missing Feedback Loop" and also conducting a workshop on - "Analytics Rebooted - A Workshop". See detailed schedule here

Then I fly directly to Arlington, VA to participate in STPCon Fall 2018. Here I will be conducting 2 workshops - "Analytics Rebooted - A Workshop" and "Practical Agile Testing Workshop". I am also speaking about "Measuring Consumer Quality - The Missing Feedback Loop".

Will share experiences from these conferences soon!


Tuesday, September 11, 2018

Testing in the Agile World

Thanks to ThoughtWorks, I was introduced to many things - 


The list is actually quite long - but that is not the intention of this post.

The main takeaway in my learning at ThoughtWorks though, is how to Test better, and be more effective in that for the end-user. 

Even before my time at ThoughtWorks, I never agreed with the thought process that Functional Automation can / should be done only when the feature is stable. But at ThoughtWorks, I did learn many more tips and tricks and techniques and processes how to do this Functional Automation in a better way, as the product is evolving.

On 9th April 2011, I had written a detailed blog post / article regarding how can we test better in the Agile world. 

This post was titled - "Agile QA Process", and the document was uploaded to slideshare with the name - "Agile QA Process". I am very pleasantly surprised that till date, that document has had over 74K views and almost 2.7K downloads, and is still my topmost viewed post on slideshare.

When I look back at the document, it still seems very relevant and applicable, to me! 

What do you think?

Saturday, March 17, 2018

Measuring Consumer Quality - The Missing Feedback Loop

I spoke in vodQA at ThoughtWorks, Pune on "Measuring Consumer Quality - the Missing Feedback Loop". 

This talk address the why and how from my earlier blog post on "Understanding, Measuring and Building Consumer Quality". I recommend you read that first, before going through the slides and video for this talk.


Abstract:

How to build a good quality product is not a new topic. Proper usage of methodologies, processes, practices, collaboration techniques can yield amazing results for the team, the organisation, and for the end-users of your product.

While there is a lot of emphasis on the processes and practices side, one aspect that is still spoken about "loosely" - is the feedback loop from your end-users to making better decisions.

SO, What is this feedback loop? Is it a myth? How do you measure it? Is there a "magic" formula to understand this data received? How to you add value to your product using this data?

In this interactive session, we will use a case study of a B2C entertainment-domain product (having millions of consumers) as an example to understand and also answer the following questions:

  • The importance of knowing your Consumers 
  • How do you know your product is working well? 
  • How do you know your Consumers are engaged with your product? 
  • Can you draw inferences and patterns from the data to reach of point of being able to make predictions on Consumer behaviour, before making any code change? 

Video:


Slides can be found here.

Pictures:



Friday, March 9, 2018

MAD-LAB - Capabilities & Features - Agile India 2018

I spoke about "Build your own MAD-LAB - for Mobile Test Automation for CD" at Agile India 2018.

Though I have spoken on this similar topic answering the question - "Why I needed to build my own MAD-LAB?" before at vodQA in July 2017 at Vuclip, quite a few things have changed since then.

Knowing the value of "being agile", a day before my scheduled talk in Agile India 2018, I decided to revamp the content substantially. To add to my challenges, (and thanks to "testing" my slides before the talk in the conference room), I also realised the slide size format I was using is incorrect, and also the projector was not "setup / configured" correctly, making all my slide colours go haywire.

So after last 10 minutes of scrambling before the talk time, I managed to get this done correctly (at least that is what I think now in hindsight.

Moral of the above story - do a test / dry-run of your slides before your audience comes in!

That said, here is the abstract of the talk.


Abstract

In this age of a variety of cloud-based-services for virtual Mobile Test Labs, building a real-(mobile)-device lab for Test Automation is NOT a common thing – it is difficult, high maintenance, expensive! Yet, I had to do it! 

The slides are part of the discussion on the Why, What and How I built my own MAD-LAB (Mobile Automation Devices LAB). The discussion also includes the Automation Strategy, Tech Stack, Capabilities & Features of MAD-LAB and the learnings from successful & failed experiments in the journey. 

Slides

Below are the slides from my talk. The link to the video will be shared once available.




Some pictures



Friday, January 26, 2018

Agile Testing & Patterns for a good Test Automation Frameworks

2018 started with a bang! I got an opportunity to speak and share my experiences in 2 rocking meetups.

Patterns of a "good" Test Automation Framework

TechnoWise meetup on 13th Jan on Patterns of a "good" Test Automation Framework went very well, with lot of interaction and discussions along the way.



What is Agile Testing? How does Automation Help?


Then, there was an impromptu meetup setup by a very proactive ISQA community at GO-JEK office in Jakarta, Indonesia on 16th Jan. The topic there was What is Agile Testing? How does Automation help? In this meetup, I also covered aspects of Career Path of a Tester, and QA Skills and Capabilities.

There were many amazing experiences from this meetup -

  • The ISQA community is very active. The meetup was setup in literally a few days and there were over 150+ attendees
  • The GO-JEK office space is a very fun place. They actually have an auditorium in the office to host meetups and similar activities, apparently, once a week!!
  • The questions / interactions with the attendees were very insightful

Here are slides shared in the meetup. I will share the link of the video as well once available.





Friday, December 29, 2017

Understanding, Measuring and Building Consumer Quality

It has been a long time since I posted anything on my blog. For those who don't know, I am working in Vuclip, a B2C company in the OTT space, where we have millions of consumers using our product via Android and iOS native apps, and the Browser too.

In the past few months, I have been in deep water taking on a new and very exciting initiative. Before I share what that is - here is a traditional approach to Quality.


Typically practices, processes, tools are chosen and implemented to help build a good Quality Product for the end-user. Evolving from Waterfall methodology to Agile methodology has been challenging for many (organizations and individuals), but has proven to be a huge step forward to achieving the goal of building a good and usable product.

In this course of time, we have (thankfully) changed the thought process of considering QA to be the "gate-keeper of Quality" to QA being a "Quality Advocate and Quality Enabler" for the team and the product. A very important change as a result has been changing the focus of QA from "finding defects" to "preventing defects".

And rightly so! After-all, why should the QA be the gate-keeper and -
  • take the responsibility and blame of someone giving poor / incomplete requirements? or,
  • someone writing bad code during development?
The QA is not a scavenger meant to clean up mess created by others. The QA instead is an enabler who -
  • helps bring all stakeholders together through the life-cycle of the product - from conceptualization to end-delivery, 
  • asks a lot of questions to find gaps, clarify assumptions, etc.
  • helps find and radiate information including risks, and,
  • is an active part of doing whatever it takes to prevent defects coming into the system
The Agile practices help do this in a collaborative way, getting features to completion in an incremental fashion, and iterating / pivoting based on the feedback received. This is also what practices related to Continuous Delivery enables us to do well.

But this is nothing new, at least for me. After all, during my fantastic journey at ThoughtWorks, I would say that these were basic tenets of why and how we worked.

That said, my eye-opener in the past few months has been to take this thought process many steps forward.

My agenda has been - how can I help influence and raise the bar of quality in such a way that we not only build a quality product, but also be in a position to predict how our millions of consumers will be able to use it.

This initiative we are calling as Consumer Quality -
  • how do we understand Quality (= value) of the product as perceived by our Consumers, 
  • what data can be relevant to understand this, how can we be proactive about looking at this data while building a quality product, and,
  • the Nirvana stage - how can we predict what actions taken will have desired impact on Consumer Quality!
I hope to be able to share with you more of this in 2018!

Happy New Year everyone! Keep Learning, Keep Sharing!

Monday, March 6, 2017

Analytics Testing

I recently spoke in an Agile Testing Conference on - The What, Why and How of (Web) Analytics Testing.

I was also part of a panel discussion having the theme - "What's not changed since moving to Agile Testing - The Legacy Continues!" There were some very interesting perspectives in this discussion.

The great part was that the audience was very involved and vocal throughout the day. This made is very interactive and good sharing of information and experiences for all!

Below is some information about the talk. I will try to add the link to the video soon.
 

Abstract

Analytics is changing the way products and services are being created and consumed.

In this session, we will learn

  • What is Analytics?
  • Why is it important to use Analytics in your product?
  • The impact of Analytics not working as expected

We will also see some techniques to test Analytics manually and also automate that validation. But just knowing about Analytics is not sufficient for business now.

There are new kids in town - IoT and Big Data - two of the most used and heard-off buzz words in the Software Industry!

With IoT, with a creative mindset looking for opportunities and ways to add value, the possibilities are infinite. With each such opportunity, there is a huge volume of data being generated - which if analyzed and used correctly, can feed into creating more opportunities and increased value propositions.

There are 2 types of analysis that one needs to think about.

1. How is the end-user interacting with the product? This will give some level of understanding into how to re-position and focus on the true value add features for the product.

2. With the huge volume of data being generated by the end-user interactions, and the data being captured by all devices in the food-chain of the offering, it is important to identify patterns from what has happened, and find out new product / value opportunities based on usage patterns.


Slides


The What, Why and How of (Web) Analytics Testing (Web, IoT, Big Data) from Anand Bagmar

Pictures







Thursday, December 8, 2016

Career Path of a Tester!

PS: This is a long post. You can can also get / read a pdf version of this from here via slideshare.

I asked in various forums - “Does a Tester need a career path? Yes / No - Why?

Thanks to all who replied and have shared deeper insights into different perspectives.

I agree with most of the thoughts and also think that the answer to the question is "It Depends!"

On what you ask? On various parameters being used to reach the answer. The parameters could be:
  • Your past experiences
  • Your current work - and how much you are enjoying it, or not. More important (IMHO is the activities you have been done, not the titles / roles you have been playing)
  • Who has inspired you in the past and present - and what was their role at the time

Career Path options for a Tester

Before I proceed further, I want to share my perspective on what I think are the options for “testers” in the Software Industry. In terms of Career Path options - I think the options are in a way clear as depicted in the mind map below.


Career Path for a Tester
Note - this article focusses on all aspects except the Managerial Track

Capabilities and Skills for a Tester

Moving along the Career Path is almost natural as you spend more time in the industry. However, to become successful along the way, there is a lot of hard work required.

There are various capabilities and skills that a Tester needs to be successful in his / her career - including but not limited to the few options shown below. 

Note:
  • These skills are more from a Individual Contributor / Technical Track perspective.
  • The mind map does not do justice to visualize easily the Levels of expertise that are possible for each of the items. The levels can be categorised into
    • Don't Know
    • Beginner
    • Intermediate
    • Expert
    • Master

Organization Focus

The Capability and Skills would differ "slightly" based on the nature / operational model of the organization you are working for.


Coaching and Consulting Focus

Coaching and Consulting focussed-roles would predominantly require strong soft-skills, but the importance and value of Technical Understanding cannot be underestimated. 



Often unfortunately, I have come across 'consultants' who know only theory, and very little practical experience of implementation. In such cases, you care not doing justice to your role. 

At the same time, I have come across brilliant Consultants who bring in a wealth of experience and knowledge (what has worked, and not worked) and apply it in the correct way in the present context. It was indeed a pleasure to work with such Consultants!

Analysis Focus

The path of the shift-left is extremely important and also not easy. You need to apply a different mindset to accomplish activities that helps build a better software even before any code is written.


Test Analyst Focus

A Tester cannot be complete without doing well in the core skills - Testing! 

Testing is complex, frustrating, tedious, slow, negative to a certain extent - finding mismatches in actual Vs expectations and can never say its 100% complete! Yet, it is a lot of fun. You get to learn a lot of things, use a variety of tools to help your Testing efforts. 

When the software is built right, and the end-user is able to do what is expected from the software you have helped build and test, Testing is also very rewarding!



There are a few things that limit the impact of Testing - 
  • Lack of curiosity
  • Lack of willingness to learn, explore and get to the deep core of the product
  • Lack of willingness to be technical (understand / contribute to product architecture, read and understand code and the automated tests)
  • Lack of willingness to experiment
  • Lack of willingness to pair with different roles - Product Owners, Business Analysts, Developers, etc
  • Unable to work as ONE TEAM!
  • ....

Technical Focus

Software Development is a highly technical activity. There is no reason why Testing should be considered as a non-technical activity.


Incubation and Initiatives

There are other activities that a Testing can be part of - these are related to Learning, Sharing, Mentoring and Contributing to make the Testing space more richer!




The Pendulum Visualization!

Another way to visualize these skills and capabilities is to think of this as a pendulum.
  • The arc created by the swinging pendulum contains all the items listed above
  • As your experience in the industry grows, you should get some level of experience in each of these aspects
  • Your passion and interests should determine what area(s) you want to get a deep-level of expertise in
  • So eventually you will end up in a T-model - the short horizontal line representing the breadth of coverage across all aspects of how you can help build a 'good' quality product, and the vertical line representing the 'deep' level of mastery and expertise you have.

Summary

The sad part!

Now that this is out of the bag - I want to highlight a few things that I have observed in the Software industry, and this is probably not limited to just the Tester role.
  • People are impatient and quickly want to move up the chain along the career path track. Motivation could be, but not limited to - Money and Power (to control). I would ask these people to do a serious introspection to figure out if they are truly doing justice to their role and their peers, Are they able to be good role models for the people “reporting” to them?
  • Career Path is necessary, but overrated. Too much emphasis is given on the “role” and not enough on the activities required to make the team successful, and make the product that will help the end-user. Focus on the big-picture, and your career will grow automatically.
  • We try to copy what others in the industry have done in their career, This is an easy way out. Instead, I recommend you understand their journey, the hard work your role-models have put in their life to get to where they are. I encourage each of you to spend some time understanding this, and then work with your mentors and people you trust to see how you can create your own path. That way, your life, journey and destination will be unique!

The Happy Ending!

Testing is a lot of fun. I have been in the Testing field since quite some time. Here are some things (in no particular order) that have kept me interested in the field:
  • Understand the domain
  • Always keep learning (domains, technologies, tools, practices, soft-skills, ...)
  • Experiment - that is the best way to learn
  • Don’t be afraid of failure. Learn from the mistakes, and ensure you do whatever possible to avoid the same mistake again
  • Be curious
  • Ask “relevant” questions
  • Challenge status-quo
  • Do NOT assume
  • Understand risk of functionality not working - will help in proper prioritization
  • “Why” before “How?”
  • Know the end-users of the product-under-test. Will help test better
  • Testing is NOT only about finding / reporting defects.
  • Use metrics that help make meaningful decisions to make the product better
  • Be patient!
  • Help build a “ONE TEAM” culture!


Monday, September 12, 2016

Agile Testing & Patterns in Test Automation Framework coming to Singapore

I will be doing a 1-day workshop on Agile Testing and also a talk on "Patterns of a Good Test Automation Framework" as part of Unicom's World Conference Next Gen Testing Summit on Oct 13-14 2016 in Singapore.

See the site for more details, or contact me for more information on the same.