If there is an API, a tester with at least a little bit of technical leaning could write some basic checks and test ideas very early in the development cycle. Working through a series of questions on how marketing people build ads might lead the team to a much better design before the software even exists. There are required fields for each step, validation for other fields, and potential for data loss. Data is grouped together into pages, and a Next button is clicked to get to the next step in the wizard. Imagine a project focused on building a wizard to help build advertising campaigns. Even though someone might not have deep programming skill, and never had familiarity with the product code base, there are places to add testerly value. They can start going to design sessions with developers. That changes drastically when testing developers are incorporated earlier in the testing process.Īs a member of an integrated team, a tester’s regular cadence looks a lot more like a developer’s day. A lot of time is either idle, or trying to find ways to avoid looking idle. In the beginning, people are waiting on requirements, and then on the new builds with new features, and then on development to be 'done' so the test team can start regression testing. There tends to be a lot of waiting involved in testing work. What does work really look like when we inject testing into all parts of a project? Even though the idea of making test happen much earlier isn't new, having a phrase has restarted an important conversation. It was an unfortunate misunderstanding of the waterfall model that got us the independent test teams and time lag between dev and test we have today. Questioning and testing happened by the same people that wrote the code, and it happened all through the project. There were no dedicated testers at the time. In the 1950's, programmers knew that it was better to start testing earlier, and did just that. It sprinkles it over each step and each iteration. Shift left doesn't exactly move testing closer to the beginning of a release cycle. Testing may still happen at the end, but it will be smaller and faster because of the problems you are able to find earlier on. And yet others find themselves pairing up with the UI and API developers to test something new on their machine before it hit a build. Others sit down with the API developers and stub out tests for new services while they were being developed. Some team members can work closely with back-end developers to ask questions and create test ideas and 'what if' type scenarios. Testers join design sessions to ask questions about how customers work, which ultimately leads to design changes. In some teams, testing is involved from the very start. Suggesting that testing shouldn't be held until the last few days before a release is the easiest way of explaining the ideas in the phrase 'shift left'. In most companies, this is just the way things have always been done. Testing is only the bottle neck when people ignore everything else that happened at the same time. It is a find problems, spend time researching and reporting, getting new builds (that hopefully worked), and retest week. The biggest problem is that testing becomes somewhat of a bottleneck for teams as they attempt to move faster. Squeezing testing in at the end creates problems. We happily get development collaborating with product folks early in the process and build the product in smaller bits, but testing early is a struggle. Most projects, even with agile teams, feel like testing is the last step in the process. When testers are mixed into that, it's usually to sit in on planning sessions, or maybe to give estimates for how long they will need to test the new code. After that, a short meeting happens where developers talk through the new features, assign tasks, and then everyone is off to work. Eventually they emerge with a specification, requirements, a roadmap, perhaps a few user stories. The product people disappear and go talk with customers. Implementation steps to develop a large computer program for delivery to a customer
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