Essense of the Whole-team Approach in Continuous testing

Inspired by Elisabeth Hocke’s course material originally published in TAU. It’s a whole lot of knowledge but thought of sharing some key facts which seems helpful for our day-to-day work in a Continuous Development and Delivery workflow.

The Whole-team approach is becoming popular in the methodology of Agile Development. In this approach, the entire team is responsible for the quality of the product and testing activities rather than overloading one person with the testing workload — which helps to avoid bottlenecks and engaging the entire team is always better.

Collaborative testing practices regularly take place and reflect on the importance of frequent deliveries. A combination of testing techniques for your team will help mentor your team to develop their testing skills and give them hands-on experience.

Continuous Testing is a procedure in which several forms of manual and automation checks are conducted continuously during the frequent distribution of the product.

Automation feedback suites best at any stage during this process, where it gives a benefit to the team.

Some of the benefits of this process are;

• Continuous feedback
• Continuous learning
• Continuous releases

Throughout the delivery process — sitting with your team, consider the process’s current practices, and find out the testing requirements for each phase, brainstorm challenges and problems that experiments can present and identify the solutions. This will help boost the quality of the product and the workflow of delivery.

Automation without an Expert

Responsibility of Test automation — is also a responsibility of the entire team when it comes to the whole-team approach. By lowering the barriers to entry, it helps the entire team easily set up the project. Depending on the context there are several ways to get the hands dirty on automation. Deciding when and how to continue learning is up to you. Having a technical background knowledge is a plus but there are no barriers to learning automation from scratch for a beginner. The best way to learn automation is to find your own way of learning because everyone has their own way of learning.

Remember, the key to your success is — always be a seeker with dirty hands-on automation, and without — you’ll never be able to become a skilled automation engineer

Working solo

Engaging with your own work alone,

• You may feel productive and do a lot of things, but that may ultimately overload yourself with work.
• You may be focusing on the stories which are assigned to you, but it may not be the high priority tasks.
• If you encounter any issues or concerns, and yet maybe you need to wait for the availability of your team.
• When you need a day off — if you were the only one who knew your work and there is nobody to continue your work during your absence.

Leave slack time in your schedule to provide quick feedback when working asynchronously, to avoid bottlenecks. Sit with your team and walk through the setup and process to accelerate your team’s knowledge of automation.

Share your expertise with others-not just your team. You can;

• Initiate testing communities and facilitate hands-on workshops.
• Maintain blogs and sessions for anyone who’s interested — it might also build attention to expand the audience.

Pair Testing / Buddy Testing

Pair testing two members, accompany a single workspace to test various aspects of the application. The advantage of pairing up is you have the knowledge of two persons available and are less likely to get blocked.

Pairing helps generate more ideas more rapidly when performing exploratory testing, debugging a problem you’ve found, implementing a new automation scenario, or finding the root cause for a user-reported problem.

Any combination can work effectively in this technique and each combination has its own significance. Best combinations for Pair testing are;

• Tester — Tester
• Tester — Developer
• Tester — User

With anyone interested in any position, however, on any team, it can be paired in any organization- after all, there are no restrictions.

Mob Approach

Mobbing is where the whole team works on the same task, in the same workspace, and on the same machine at the same time. This approach makes it possible for the whole team to synchronize all the time and share information within the team which also makes it easy to team up with new members on board. It’s a perfect time to get involved if it helps your team transform the perfect.

Conclusion

Your context is unique to your project hence trying things out and see what works and what doesn’t. You may be practicing various development methodologies, delivery strategies, and different testing techniques in your project. If you plan to shift to another approach, do a small experiment — it won’t harm you unless you turn fully and start practicing without testing the suitability. Before initiating an experiment make sure the perceived problem is clear. Prior to planning your experiment, write down your basic theory and ways to calculate the result of the experiment. Experiments can also be performed whenever the team is ready and start with rather small samples to ease that.

I hope this was helpful to you... Special Thanks to Elisabeth Hocke for providing this course.

Happy reading!! :)