What do we mean by testers learning to be technical?

I recently read a post by Justin Rohrman entitled "Do testers need to code".  The following line gave me some concerns:

"So, I think that testers do need to learn some programming skills now."

Now I wish to begin by stating I am not against testers learning to code  if that is something they are interested in and they want to learn.  On the other hand it may not be the best value skill you could bring to a team, especially if you already have 5-6 exceptional coders on your team.   Justin within the article tries to align to this thought with the following:

"My new feeling is that testers need to learn to program, or at least become more technical –write SQL, use developer tools effectively, read code — for any sort of longevity in the field. "

I have blogged about this in the past- 'A discussion on do tester really need to code.' in which I talk about adding value by learning the syntax of code.  I was asked on twitter by Marcel Gehlen to provide an example of what I meant by this.  I replied with the following:

'I understand the syntax of the french language but I am terrible at speaking it.'

The main point of this update to the 'testers need to code' debate is around what we mean by being 'more technical'?  To the majority of people and from the many articles I come across this implies learning to code.  I feel this is too narrow and at the same time limits the potential and opportunities testers may have.  As an example if you now have a team in which everyone can code and there is a need to reduce the team due to financial and business pressures.   If the decision being made is based upon coding skills then I feel testers could be at risk.

Where does this learning to code end?    In the modern development world of 'devops' are we now going to state that operational people and marketing people should now learn to code?  we could end up with an over saturated market of half decent coders.  What skills are going to make testers stand out and be seen to be adding both team and business value?

Taking a step back what do we mean by coding?

I can writing scripts in bash which to me is similar to writing test script in the sense of logical following steps.  At the same time I understand the command line interface to enable me to deploy a test environment.  Going forward into the devops model I can write dockerfiles to create containers..

#
# Super simple example of a Dockerfile
#
FROM ubuntu:latest
MAINTAINER Andrew Odewahn "odewahn@oreilly.com"

RUN apt-get update
RUN apt-get install -y python python-pip wget
RUN pip install Flask

ADD hello.py /home/hello.py

WORKDIR /home

Example from http://odewahn.github.io/docker-jumpstart/building-images-with-dockerfiles.html

I understand how to use ansible to deploy an environment to enable me to test and run automated checks.

These are, what many would class as, highly technical skills.  However as Jerry Weinberg just posted about 'Becoming a Better programmer; ' there are other skills that are of value to a team and to the business that many would not class as technical.  The ability to get people to work well together and collaborate and communicate is a highly desirable skill to have.  Since it is classed as a soft skill not a lot of emphasis is placed upon this as a skill testers should learn.

What about analytical skills, as more and more companies move to a devops model for software delivery, the skill of being able to determine patterns within the software from all the data and collate that data to help improve try and improve the quality is a highly demanding and technically challenging skill.  I can see this skill becoming highly desirable in the future.  Maybe a tester could invest their time learning this skill?

Then we have the other areas such as an understanding of human behavior to help influence the design .  Learning about social science and systems thinking to help see the big picture and overcome obstacles for the team.   I have been running a series of blog posts on skills testers should learn away from the traditional 'must code' school of thought.  Using your time wisely to practice and improve these skills can help you become a better tester and more importantly show your value to the business.

A few examples are given below (feel free to browse my blog for other examples)

• http://steveo1967.blogspot.com.co/2016/06/testing-skills-10-persuasion-and-selling.html
• http://steveo1967.blogspot.com.co/2015/11/testing-skills-8-being-skeptic.html
• http://steveo1967.blogspot.com.co/2015/10/testing-skills-7-reflection.html

Also with your testing skill set you could mentor, coach and teach others about testing and how they can use that to help improve the software.  Set yourself a goal of coaching the programmers in simple test techniques that they could look to add to their frameworks to enable you to focus more on the difficult to find issues using exploratory testing .

Again I wish to state I am not against tester learning and if they feel they have a passion towards coding then go and do it.   At the same time think about what else they could learn that adds both team and business value.

Testing skills #3 - Leading Teams

If you are leading a software development team it is a good idea to provide to provide an environment in which each member of the team feels safe, valued and important.  It takes a lot of skill to lead teams without resorting to command and control style of managing the team.  Providing the team a safe environment in which it is OK to experiment a little and be able to learn from failing is crucial to encourage creativity and innovation within the team.   When leading a team in this way you can act as the facilitator and ensure that the bad elements of teamwork do not start to impact the team dynamics.  You can be the sounding board, the oracle, the voice of reason, the mentor, the confidant, by doing this you encourage the team to flourish which leads to success.

As a leader you also need to give the team a clear direction of what you expect the team to deliver, this can change as time passes however, this should always be transparent and visible to the team.  Ask yourself as the leader what do you want from the team?  What is your ultimate goal and then explain that to the team along with your preferred priorities.  Then step back and watch the team self-form around the problem to provide you with a solution.

The principles behind the the agile manifesto has some useful tips for leading and working in teams.

"Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done."

"The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation."

"At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly."

J Richard Hackman provides the following five tips for leading teams.

1. Teams must be real. People have to know who is on the team and who is not. It’s the leader’s job to make that clear.
2. Teams need a compelling direction. Members need to know, and agree on, what they’re supposed to be doing together. Unless a leader articulates a clear direction, there is a real risk that different members will pursue different agendas.
3. Teams need enabling structures. Teams that have poorly designed tasks, the wrong number or mix of members, or fuzzy and unenforced norms of conduct invariably get into trouble.
4. Teams need a supportive organization. The organizational context—including the reward system, the human resource system, and the information system—must facilitate teamwork.
5. Teams need expert coaching. Most executive coaches focus on individual performance, which does not significantly improve teamwork. Teams need coaching as a group in team processes—especially at the beginning, midpoint, and end of a team project.

Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances - J. Richard Hackman - 2002

Something Old, Something New

"Be careful. People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things. New things . . . well, new things aren’t what they expect. They like to know that, say; a dog will bite a man. That is what dogs do. They don’t want to know that man bites a dog, because the world is not supposed to happen like that. In short, what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds . . . Not news but olds, telling people that what they think they already know is true." 

TERRY PRATCHETT The Truth: a Novel of Discworld

This passage from the Terry Pratchett novel "The Truth" resonates very much with me especially when it comes to world of testing.  I see a connection with how different people in our craft react with each other when it comes to new ideas, thoughts and innovations.  There are those who embrace change and want to know more.  There are then those who like time to think critically and use different forms of reasoning before deciding if it is good or not.  Then there are those who dismiss out of hand anything new, anything that makes them feel uncomfortable or goes against their current beliefs.

My concern and the reason for this blog post is how within testing we can become more creative and innovative.  As one of my previous post stated I think to be creative we need to think about finding problems than trying to solve them.  Continuing on the path of our focus being only to solve problems restricts our creative thinking.  At the same time we need to find ways to convince those who dismiss anything new or unexpected.  To do this a set of guidelines should be introduced to encourage creative thinking rather than discourage:

• Those who easily dismiss new ideas should not be quick to be negative, negative comments and views are one of the easiest ways to destroy creativity.

“The creative impulses of most people can be suffocated by negative criticism, cynical put-downs or dismissive remarks.” 

Ken Robinson – Out of our Minds

• Company leaders need to lead from the top and encourage new ideas and innovation, making the task of thinking (creative and divergent) as important as other everyday tasks. They need to give time to allow this to happen.

“it’s not enough to think differently. We also have to act differently” 

Abraham Lincoln (Taken from  Ken Robinson – Out of our Minds)

• There is a need to encourage people to try, and to see failure and mistakes as learning opportunities. We should stop blaming and encourage risk taking to enhance the opportunities for serendipity moments.

“We don’t teach people how to deal with failure and this is a fundamental oversight.” 

Ken Robinson – Out of our Minds

• We need to have more diversity within teams, encourage people who may have different views to yourself to work with you.  Employ someone who thinks differently to you.  This gives more chances that new ideas will be generated from these differences.

“Such people will provide a wider range of knowledge from which to extract information and build upon ideas.” 

Why diversity is the mother of  creativity - Jeffrey Baumgartner

• Spend more on training the people who work with you or for you.  Take an interest in their learning, encourage, mentor, and support their creative needs.

 “Creative teaching requires moving from a focus on imparting knowledge to knowledge acquisition, providing opportunities for the learner to engage in deep thought and productive action.” 

Susan Keller-Mathers, Encyclopedia of Giftedness, Creativity, and Talent

• It is not enough to come up with new ideas; creativity involves doing something and applying your ideas.

"Innovation is the process of putting new ideas into practice. Innovation is applied creativity." 

Ken Robinson – Out of our Minds

Some may find this a strange post and wonder what it has to do with testing.  I see testing as a very creative process especially when it is unburdened from too much process and stifled by procedures.  Exploratory testing lends itself very easily to the creative process and encourages the tester to think and discover new and exciting ideas.  We need to do more of this style of thinking so we become more engaged with our creative side.  A few people over the past few years have been saying that testing is dead, I would say that the non-thinking uncreative tester is going to die out and become extinct  (The checking robots as some may classify them).  We need to encourage and develop working environments in which  people can connect to their creative side and be allowed the freedom to explore new ideas and not be afraid of making affordable small mistake from which they can learn.

I will leave you with one of my favourite quotes from the American poet Jack Kerouac,  It is OK to be different and to challenge the status quo we need to encourage more crazy ones into testing.

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round heads in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. But the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” 

Jack Kerouac

Book Review Experiential Learning - Beginning

Experiential Learning Beginning - Gerald Weinberg - A Book review

Telling is not teaching

This is my first attempt at trying to review a book so please be patience with me.

Part of my role in work is to coach and mentor other testers and this can either be informal or formal half day/full day workshops.  I have been fortunate and been given opportunities to coach exploratory testing to other testing teams within our organisation all over the world.  As part of this I do a mixture of both lecturing and practical workshops.  Some of which have been successful and others less so, I have always wondered what makes some successful and others not so.

I follow the blog posts of Gerald M Weinberg and have noticed his comments about putting together some books on Experiential learning and after researching this a little more I found it could be very useful for what I do as a day to day job.

It was because of this research that I decided to purchase the first two books by Weinberg on experiential learning: (There is a third book currently in the process of being written)

• Experiential Learning – Beginning
• Experiential Learning – Inventing

This review mainly focus on the first book (I have not completely reading the second one yet.)  Before I start I should state that these books do not offer a step by step guide on how to implement experiential learning into your coaching style.  The book acts more like a tour guide and offers you points on how to think differently in how you organise and run workshops.  These books are about making you think about being creative in your workshops and encouraging people to learn by doing rather than by you telling them. 

This reminds me of a quote by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

We are better at doing than learning. Our capacity for knowledge is vastly inferior to our capacity for doing things – our ability to tinker, play, discover by accident.

http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/notebook

I do wonder if this/was a catalyst for the books that Weinberg has written.

Experiential Learning – Beginning 

It is very difficult to do justice in a review of a book which by its design is quite a technical book so I do hope Weinberg will forgive me a little if I quote directly from the book and miss some sections out otherwise this review could be very long.  Any misunderstanding or otherwise from the material within the book are my own making and no way reflect on the views that Weinberg may have been attempting to get across.

The first part of the book gives the reader some examples on how to start to implement experiential learning into their workshops.  It uses a zero level example of dividing your group into two teams and getting them to learn by doing the exercise and seeing what they could do by using the alternative method/approach you are trying to teach them.   From this first chapter I was able to come up with 3 or 4 different zero level examples I could use in my workshops.  The chapter explains the importance of feedback (I agree with this so much and is one of my frustrations with testing we do not feedback often enough.)  Weinberg goes on to explain how to design an experiential class and for using an off the shelf starting point.  All these suggestions give you the reader valuable pointers that can be applied with some thought on your behalf to any workshop exercises that you need to deliver.

The next chapter deals with how to construct an experiential leaning program and introduces the three stages of experiential learning.

1. Exploration
2. Invention
3. Application

Within this section Weinberg presents a quote from Piaget: - Learning was a process of constructing not receiving new knowledge


Which indicates that to learn we need to do and construct our own thoughts and theories with some adjustment from the trainer.  Hence we allow the class to explore, we allow them to invent solution and then we apply the solution to the problems found. (This sounds so much like exploratory testing)  The role of the trainer changes from a lecturing role to a supporting guiding role.

Weinberg then goes on in the next chapter to explain in detail how to create learning cycles within the workshops and getting students to be responsible for their learning. This is expanded in the next few chapters in which bad exercises can be used to create good idea, Evolution an Exercise and improving the exercises metaphor.

The next chapter on using progress observation is one which offered me some insights as to the role of the trainer.  I have come from a traditional background of learning and teaching in which I stand in front of the room and present.  However either from my own experiences or from some unknown source some of my workshops are 100% practical and I take a role in observing and supporting rather than telling the group what should happen.  I have found that these workshops are the most successful in getting the message across and this chapter backs this up with a few more examples on how I can improve what I already do.  I especially like the section on the importance of feelings.  Something I have talked about in the past within this blog.

The next few charters deals with moving your own workshops forward and starting to generate ideas , being able to lead exercises ad keeping  exercises simple.  There are some interesting concepts discussed here along with reference to Weinberg’s other excellent book on the secrets of consulting.  The key elements of these chapters is guidance on prevents you the trainer from jumping in and showing people how to get to the so0ltuons without them working out for themselves, a difficult skill to master.

These are followed by a chapter on the opening exercise in which Weinberg describes the course principals and their importance to successful learning.

These principals being.

• Safe
• Comfortable
• Transparent
• Fun
• Considerate
• Redundant

He then describes methods to form teams and gather requirements for the exercise.

This is followed by a few chapters on working with people who do not and do know each other with some methods that can be used to encourage team work.  It also gives some advice on dealing with conflict issues with the group that may arise. These sections were the only ones that I am not sure at this time offer me any benefits.

There is also in between these chapters a chapter on Virginia Satirs Three Questions in which Weinberg starts a workshop by looking for answers to the three big picture questions.

• How do they happen to be here? (Past)
• How do they feel about being here? (Present)
• What would they like to have happen? (Future)

These provide really good pointers as to why people are attending your workshop and provide the trainer with some valuable knowledge that can be used to help tailor the training so that they want to learn (An important concept of experiential learning)

The book finishes with some pointers on using exercises to help deepen working relationships within the group which appears to naturally lead on to the next book – Invention.  Which I have currently started to read and find it very interesting……

Conclusion
This is not an easy book for a novice to get into and requires you to read and then reread chapters.  This I feel is the intention of the book, it is to encourage you to reflect and think before you act and is a powerful way of helping you to learn and understand something. Would I recommend the book to other?    Yes I would, it is another tool in the arsenal of testers who need to mentor; they provide some very useful techniques and approaches that you can adapt to meet your needs.    There are some section in the book which frustrated me since it appears to concentrate on getting teams to worth together rather than how to use experiential learning to encourage people to learn, but maybe I need to reflect and think more on the message that is being delivered.

They are not a blue print for showing you how to deliver testing workshops more a guide to help you understand that people do not learn from being lectured to using a bulleted slideshow. (Death by Power point)

What I found interesting is that in the past I have been fortunate to have attended a few workshops by Michael Bolton and I can see some of the techniques that Weinberg has suggested within the book being used by Michael.  I do wonder if Michael is a student of experiential learning.  These book could teach the ‘factory schools’ a thing or two about how to learn to do testing, it is by doing rather than telling. That maybe a topic for another blog post!

 As part of my journey learning more about experiential learning I came across the following resources that people may find of interest/use

David A. Kolb on experiential learning
International Consortium for Experiential Learning

**Some corrections made - thanks Phil - I should proof read before hitting the publish button!**

Apprenticeship schemes at Test Conferences

A quick blog on a thought I have had.

I read an article today about how we could try and fix the IT skills gap that exists within the UK, this may also apply around the world, by getting young adults into apprenticeships. I have a view that for some people academia study is not for them and they would better suited to a vocational training course instead of a university degree. I never went to university and as such I do not have a degree. Do I feel as if I have missed out? I do not think so but I have not experienced university life so cannot be sure if I missed out something I may have liked.

I think within our profession of testing we have an opportunity to mentor and help create the next generation of testers (not discounting coders, architects) and allowing them to build their skills and knowledge up by learning from experience rather than studying non relevant subjects at university (How many universities do testing as a degree?) As Nassim Nicholas Taleb has said we as human beings are far better at learning from doing rather than from books. I have over the past year been mentoring two people in our craft of testing one is still on-going the other has managed to secure a tester role within a company, neither have been involved in testing beforehand. I feel we within our community should be trying to do this and encourage young adults by maybe taking them under our tutorage, it does not require a large amount of personal investment, a few hours per week. Or maybe within our companies we should all start looking at trying to introduce apprenticeship schemes, let’s try to tap into this vast resource who in my opinion feels they have been abandoned by the educational system.

On the other side I want to call out to those who run conferences, EuroSTAR, CAST, Lets test, UNICOM and say let’s advertise for young adults who may have an interest to come along as an apprentice for the length of the conference. They would not pay a fee but would be expected to produce a report on their thoughts and what actions they intend to take away for the future. I am have not finalized these thoughts but it would give these young adults to get engagement in a craft which I myself feel very passionate about.

Maybe the organizations that run the conferences could look at running an apprenticeship competition, vetting process. I am sure there are many vocational colleges (Both UK and around the world) who would be willing to get involved in this. It has the added effect that it will start to raise in the minds of the next generation of influential people the value of testing and put testing out there as a forwarding thinking craft that people want to get involved with.

What do others think?

I would especially love some feedback from conference organizers to see how feasible these ideas are.

Mentoring a New Tester - First test challenge

The following is the results from setting Matthew the eBay challenge which was created by Jon Bach for a weekend testing session. The reported produced by Matthew including his thoughts and thinking – anything which is in red italics are my comments.

Once the session had finished I arranged a debrief and the results of that can also be found in this blog article.

The Mission:

Use the eBay website and find the most expensive product, the most unusual and to get just one hit

Most expensive:

My initial thoughts on this is to just leave the product description blank and go for the greatest product price given to me in the cost field.

Most Unusual:

I'm thinking on this one to just enter in the product field, a few random letters and numbers. What is unusual…? I suppose that’s up to me to decide.

Just one Hit:

This has stumped me. How do you get just one hit without knowing what is on offer. Maybe if I knew the exact product name I could enter it, but even then a search engine will look at all the words entered and come up with a few other options for me, defeating my challenge. Trial and error? Or just entering one random word that I think will be a rarity on eBay, like an ‘AAD’ – Mentor comment What is AAD? I think I will try the latter.

Most expensive:

Straight away no field for price, so clicked on advanced. Mentor comment – could this have been planned/scripted before using the product?

Mentor comment – notice the use of ebay.co.uk – would ebay.com give difference results? I did not specify which to use (assumption was made) Good example of ambiguous requirements?

Typed in 10,000,000

Error

So now I am going to also enter into the keyword/item number field the number ‘1’ as a I imagine most item numbers will have a 1 in it. – Mentor comment – why number not letter? The use of wildcards?

Chose the field ‘all categories’ as this was the most likely category for the most expensive as it will search the whole site.

As well as entering the min price of 10.000.000 and leaving the max price because I don’t want to limit myself considering what I am trying to find.

Click search

It looks like I might have found the upper limit for eBay with only three items all coming in at the same price. –Mentor comment – interesting when this task was done for weekend testing there was no such limit found on ebay.com – is this just a co.uk limit? Is it a legal issue?

But are these the most the most expensive.

Have now entered ‘2’ into the keywords field. –Mentor comment – good exploring – testing your theories based upon results.

Same 3 as above were found plus another, reinforcing the fact that eBay may have an upper limit of £12,869,224.17

Have now entered ‘3’ into the keywords field.

Nothing else found except what has already been found.

Now going to change the min price to 13,000,000 and fill the keywords field with ‘2’, as this was the one with the most hits.

Nothing found.

There is no individual most expensive item, only that eBay has - mentor comment – has is strong word – are you sure? Appears to have may be better an upper price limit of £12,869,224.17 on a number of items. - Mentor comment – as per previous comment does this apply to all eBay sites?

Most Unusual:

Entered a few random letters and numbers into the keyword field on the homepage as shown below.

Found mainly stamps.

Unusual hobby, but not unusual enough for me. - Mentor comment – you need to expand on your definition of what is unusual to you.

Typed in unusual and found mainly ornaments. Not there yet.

Another word for unusual… ‘Quirky’, entered that, found mainly clothes. - Mentor comment – good trying to find different meaning – a dictionary/thesaurus could be useful here

Still not there.

Maybe ‘weird, entered that and found pens in the style of syringes, more disturbing than unusual.

So I thought that this may take to long with me just entering random words. So I thought what might be unusual to me.

I went back to the home page and I looked through the drop down menu.

And thought that the industrial field is something I know nothing about, and may provide me with some unusual items. So chose that field and left the keywords field blank.

Before I had a chance to look at these results I saw excavator. Unusual to me, can also be quite funny at times, so I decided to choose that from the related searches bar under the search tool.

Scrolled down the results page and mainly saw digging machinery.

Mentor comment – love the thinking process being described on how you move from one way to find a solution to the next

Until I saw this

This to me is unusual. Never seen it nor am I likely to see it anywhere else funny to boot too.

Mentor comment – Great result I would have also pointed out the obvious about the digger being a pick up only and delivery being free

Just One Hit:

I thought I would try just entering one random word that I think will be a rarity on eBay, like an ‘AAD’.

So I put ‘aad’ in the keywords field and searched all categories

No good. The word ‘aad’ can be placed into any word of the thousands of products out there.

So I am now thinking of narrowing that field so I chose the advanced search button on the home page.

Chose the fields below to try and narrow the sites search options.

Not what I was looking for. I narrowed the search options that much that the site could not find anything, so it decides to ‘help’ me and remove some of my search options to give me a few items for me to look at.

I’m thinking now that you cannot randomly try and narrow the search as the search engine will just try and ‘help’. So maybe if I know an item to be there that I type into the keywords field the exact spelling of that known item. I am going to use one the most expensive items (previously found) as an example. As shown below.

Mentor comment – love this way of thinking – very thoughtful analytic mind

Eureka!

Is this cheating though? – Mentor comment – hmmm NO – you achieved the mission the system allowed you to do this - so it is not cheating just manipulating the system to achieve a result.

All I was asked to do was to get just one hit. I have that one hit. So is this testing the system? The search engine did not try and ‘help’ me on this one. It might know that I am not randomly searching and therefore did not want to help me? In this case then, I have tested the system to get just one hit, so long as you know that an item is there.

Mentor comment – useful information to get one hit you need to know about an item first - good piece of knowledge to be made aware of

Debrief:

During the debrief with Matt I loosely used the PROOF (LA) method

We talked about what had happened during the testing session and Matt replied that it a challenge since he had not done anything like this before in the sense of calling it ‘testing’

He enjoyed the session and felt a sense of achievement in meeting the missions but felt his lack of experience and knowledge of testing techniques hindered him and it was something he felt he needs to do some more learning on.

Matt compared the way he went through the list of missions as similar to army briefs in the sense of some upfront planning of what needs to be done to achieve the goal, he felt his experience of this type of context helped a great deal. During the recording of the session and making his notes he stated that there appeared to be a comparison to recording physic experiments. Where you have a theory to prove/disapprove, you then describe your results and form a conclusion based upon the analysis of the results.

The things that hindered Matt were a lack of clear objectives – something the army instils and some testing knowledge. As part of his homework I asked Matt to research wildcard searches and boundary analysis.

Overall Matt enjoyed the session and is looking forward to the next one.

From my experience it is so easy for those of us who have been in the testing field for awhile to forget how much of the techniques and practises we do by instinct and from our inbuilt repository. Something we should remember when starting with someone new to testing.

Until the next challenge…..

Mentoring a New Tester

A couple of days ago my son in law was talking to my wife with regards to what he would like to do after he completes his service in the Army and what options he has. From this conversation my wife had an idea about him entering the world of software testing and as such asked me to have a word with him to see if he would like to join this crazy world.

Matt (@Matt_Wellington) is a member of the Royal engineers and has done two tours of Afghanistan has a member of the EOD bomb search team. He spends his days searching for IEDs and making sure it is safe for colleagues and local people to walk safely on the roads. He currently has two years (plus) left in the Army and is looking for new challenges; well software testing is a challenge and one I feel he could be great at.

I mentioned on twitter that I was thinking of mentoring Matt and any advice would be welcome.

I got a sudden flurry of encouraging tweets.

@ola_hylten

@steveo1967 Why not dig into the exercises in rapid software testing? I don't think @jamesmarcusbach or @michaelbolton would mind that!

@PeterWalen

@steveo1967 Who is he with and when does he get out? I might suggest some intro stuff "Testing Computer Software" tied with non comp. books.

@michaelbolton

@steveo1967 Give him something to test. Observe him doing it. Feed back. Repeat

@destruise

@steveo1967 It gives them a good insight on the 'before' and 'after', and by writing cases from the start they are productive! win/win :)

@ola_hylten

@steveo1967 Then you can move on and do weekend testing with him observing first and then you do pair testing with him at the keyboard.

@michaelbolton

@steveo1967 "How do you recognize a bug?" has many parallels with "How do you recognize a bomb?"

@steveo1967 So let me get this straight: he searches for things that might blow up harmfully, and you say he has no testing experience?! ;)

@ola_hylten

@michaelbolton @steveo1967 Good point Michael :) Software testing has less personal risks, hopefully, most of the time ;)

@PeterWalen

@steveo1967 agree w/ @michaelbolton He's got training in critical thinking now apply it differently. 1/2

@PeterWalen

@steveo1967 @michaelbolton If he's not ovrseas maybe test meetups may help? Software generally safer than ordinance ;)

So after explaining what testing involves (Briefly – some may think how can you do this briefly!!!)

I first gave him the challenge as suggested by Michael Bolton ‘How do you search/recognise a bomb?”

Matt explained about planning before hand, then re-evaluating when at the site, following safety procedures and using local and own knowledge to search the area. Then when something looks suspicious use techniques learnt during training and on the job experience to confirm the presence of an explosive. Marking the area as such if it is dangerous or the fact it has been searched and then reporting to his senior office the results of what was found.

After hearing this I explained the comparisons with software testing and his answer was is that all this is to it then? Oh the joys of the innocent……

I then gave Matt some material to read, wrongly or rightly the CD from the ISEB course, I feel this is a good way to start and to get to know some of the basic methods of testing, boundary, static etc. I also gave him copies of some excellent software testing books.

The art of software testing by Myers

A Practitioner's Guide to Software Test Design by Lee Copeland

Both which I still use as references

My plan for mentoring are as following

• Basic techniques – the toolset every tester needs
• Scripted Testing
• Exploratory Testing
• Test planning
• Test reporting/debrief
• Weekend testing
• Paired testing

The aim is to have lots and lots of practical/hands on.

Matt does have limited time since in a cpl of weeks he will be working 7 days a week so I need to use an approach which is not overloading and allows him to build up his testing skill set and increase his confidence of the craft.

To this aim I gave Matt his first testing exercise based upon a weekend testing session organized by Jon Bach

The mission was to test the ebay website and find:

• The most expensive
• A search that returned only one result
• A search that returned an unusual item

I asked him to document what he did, what he found and most important his thought process.

The results of this first testing session are amazing – I think I have found I natural tester…… I will publish the results of this first testing effort in my next article.

If anyone wants to help/encourage/support or advise Matt then please get in touch with him on twitter (@Matt_wellington)