Last Friday, had an opportunity to have a virtual coffee session with the amazing personality “Anne-Marie Charrett” who is an internationally recognised expert in software testing, Co-founder of Testing Times, keynotes speaker for international conferences.
It was a coincidence that I came across her Mentoring session which was open for 8 Members, happens every friday for 8 weeks from 27th March.
At first, to be honest, I was really reluctant to register for the session as it is my first time experience with an internationally recognised personality/ industry leader. But, yeah we need to overcome our fears to be better ourselves right? And knowing that it was not a 1 to 1 session & there would be 7 more members(out of which 2 were my colleagues) to attend along with me gave the confidence to go for it!! 🙂
But, later after the event, I would say that clicking on the SignUp for the event was one among the best decisions I took last week.
So to start with, we all received a mail from Marie on Thursday, which had a link to funretro to fill up the topics to discuss(more like a lean coffee session) and the discussion will be based on the voting we do while online session along with zoom meeting link for session.
I also added one point to discuss which was a burning question in my mind for long time and was eager to have her thought on that.
Then comes the Coffee Day:
Same like the initial decision, I was quite nervous to attend the session at first which started at 8.30 AM MYT. And my nervousness made me delayed by 5 mins & I joined the session by 8.35 AM. There were 4 more members other than Marie during that time.
- Ileana Herrera (QA Lead, Scrum Master at Integra Media and Organizer at Salta MoT Meetups) whom I have met virtually once during Ministry of Testing Sfax Virtual coffee, which gave me a relief, that I know one person 🙂
- Sneha Viswalingam (Test Automation Engineer from Pittsburg)
- Amrit Kumar Shetty (Sr. Test Analyst from Testing Times)
- Rampraesath (QA Automation Engineer from Fave) : My colleague
Marie was very welcoming and during the initial 5 mins itself I was able to get rid of my anxiety. We started with introducing each other and sharing about one good thing happened last week…
I was totally blank on what to share when thinking about the good things happened and what I could come up with was my cooking experiment for my wife!! Seriously!!! But, yeah they all were happy to listen to whatever it was 🙂 Sometimes, even small things can be an achievement 🙂
And then it’s time to reveal thee topics for discussion:
- Blogging Tips added by Sneha
- Quality Reports anonymous
- 100 % automated tests : A myth or reality [This was the one I added]
- How to help BA with change management process added by Amrit
As we all are fan of blog post’s by Marie, there is no question for most voted topic 🙂 The discussion started with “Blogging Tips”…
Blogging Tips:
She shared us that, she have more drafts compared to the published one’s. And also, the 1 hr blogging challenge during daily commute which was insightful.
Sneha shared about her “Post It” idea, in which she writes whatever come across in mind and post it in social media, without really thinking about it..
Ileana, was not much into writing and then Marie suggested her to start with Podcast, since blogging is not always about writing only. It’s about finding the right medium to share your thoughts or communicate with others.
And then we all shared our opinions on blogging, and one of the take-away from that was to “Overcome your fear and write what you have in your mind without trying to be a perfectionist always.
Next, was Quality Reports:
We shared our thoughts on reporting and need for reporting in Software testing. Some of the points were:
- We should identify the targeted audience to whom which the report is prepared
- What we do in our organisations for reporting etc
- Is people really caring about the numbers which you share?
- How to make it presentable in a better and innovative way
- Software Resilience Testing
- Live Reporting suggestions: Integrating power BI tool (we can call it, awesome reporting)
Let’s have a look to our fun, crazy, curious awesome reporting:
We discussed on having a train to illustrate the status/progress of deployment/tests. The second one was to have traffic signals with Red, Green, Yellow to illustrate the status of testing to others. Even, raspberry pi came into our discussion for implementing this..
Awesome right!!! Let’s try integrating that 🙂
And, next it was time for my burning question, 100 % automated tests : A myth or reality
It was really fun to start explaining this, since Marie went to get her boxing gloves and get ready 🙂
So why I wrote this right?
I was having thoughts like, can we automate everything we have? Do we really need to do that? What will be our ROI if we do so?
As expected, it needs a long discussion based on what you are trying to solve. And to have fully automated solutions is hard to achieve since we cannot ignore exploratory and manual tests. Also, the cost for implementing and maintaining those are huge.
And one important thing is the “brittleness” we introduce in the system with all those tests.
It will be repeated or redundant if we didn’t really scope it to which layer you are trying to achieve the 100% coverage. If in all layers, it’s repeating the same tests and won’t be serving the purpose.
So, to conclude.. It’s still a MYTH!!
Last one, How to help BA with change management process:
It was really great to see Amit added this question, and he really wanted to help BA.
This topic led to share about : 3 Amigos in testing
And then, we discussed about definition of done, requirement specifications & how QA can optimise the process.
One important point was, sometimes we need to revisit the process which we already have in place to achieve a common goal…
With this it was time to wrap up our one hour long wonderful discussion and sharing session. Actually didn’t really notice the time after getting involved into it.
Even though we all were not having coffee in our hands, it was really a fruitful session with lot of take-aways.
I haven’t elaborated everything in detail. It’s just a snippet of what we had on Friday 🙂
Here’s the funretro board which we used:
If you are interested to attend this wonderful initiative, please refer here to book the appointment: https://www.testingtimes.com.au/mentoring/
