Enroute to find peace amidst the Chaos: “Buddha In Testing”

So after participating couple of awesome virtual coffee sessions, one with Ministry of Testing Sfax and Coffee with Annie Marie.

The next challenge I had in mind for myself was to read a book on Quality. Which ended up shortlisting/bookmarking a dozen of books and it was really hard to choose one from that.

As a break for selection process, I was looking at my LinkedIn feeds and saw a post added by one of my friends on the book “Buddha In Testing”. The name itself was enough to catch my eyes.

And then obviously, I looked for the author and came to know that it was written by Pradeep Soundararajan, Founder CEO of Moolya Testing & Appachhi, Keynote speaker, and one among the famous & inspiring leaders in testing landscape. I am really fond of his way of writing & an active follower of his blog. He is a person, who is on a mission to optimise & solve the overall process & pain-points around the world of software testing.

With great vision comes more innovative tools, Right? We can clearly say that the Moolya’s products were built with that vision in mind:

Perfachhi[A pre-prod performance monitoring platform for mobile apps], Appachhi[Platform for Functional Performance Automation API, Web & Mobile Apps], Bugasura[A tool to Automate Test Data, Recording & Reporting].

So, there was no second thought to choose this book to start with…

I bought the Kindle version from Amazon, and started reading.

After reading the preface itself answered why “Buddha” in testing. The first thought which comes up on hearing the name Buddha is peace. And that’s exactly what we’ll have after reading this book. It explains about Why, Transformation & Spirituality.

My slow pace didn’t help me to finish it in one day. But, I would say the max you’ll spend for reading will be 2-2.5 days(That’s what a slow reader like me took).

But that reading will be just a beginning of what you gain from it. You will have the peace and answers to a lot of challenges which you faced/will face during the course of career, and solutions for the chaos around you. I would say that, it will definitely arouse the curiosity in you with new thoughts and answers. It’s an easy read with crisp facts & defines a framework to help us to tackle all the chaos.

He clearly explains the fundamental problems around testing and how he managed to solve those problems along with giving ideas/solutions on improving ourselves practically.

The book spans across 4 chapters, which are as follows:

Note: This is just a spoiler of headings included in book, I highly recommend the book to read the detailed content

Fundamentals

• Describes Testing as a feedback loop with the equation:

The product doesn't work as per requirements + The product requirements could be wrong + The Product violates user agreements + The Product first time user experience isn't great + The Product is inconsistent to claims + etc

• Then, It explained the chaos we have on Automation in Testing:
  • He clearly explains why automation is not a replacement for testing & why it should be seen as a service to testing. Sometimes, automating everything will end-up spending a lot on maintenance costs.

• Test Coverage & Testability
  • Is it really number of test cases executed and number of bugs identified which determines your test coverage?? -> Then you should definitely read this chapter.
  • Here, the author states about the inner peace he attained by developing tools like Bugasura, to enable testability for testers

There are other topics which details about functional, regression and unit tests, which I leave for you guys to explore from book.

Statements

Here, the author shares about the common statements we come across in our career,

QA as last line of defence!!

Missed the BUG!!

Manual dead!!

Testers and DevOps

I would say, I came across all these statements in my career, sometimes got frustrated also. But, after reading this, I really know how to get rid of those chaos and attain inner peace.

Testing & Quality actually come as an output of Collaboration and Communication. And Quality is everyone’s responsibility.

We all should see it as a team work. If something goes wrong in production it’s not only testers or dev’s who is responsible. It is the whole Team.

Communication

This chapter really helps to understand the communication with stakeholders like business people, BA’s & PO’s, CTO & VP and emphasis the importance of having Dev+Test as one team mindset. Also, speaks about the role of developers in supporting testing activities.

Life and Career

Here, the author explains about the importance of unit testing & Test Pyramid. I agree to that fact that, we all are among the 95% of people who live in the darker side of that pyramid.

The author also explains well on how testing is impacted by organisational culture. And, agree to the point that bottom is just a symptom of the problem that is at the top.

And, the book comes with the link to a career analysis tool. Which gives an intuitive report after the evaluation based on your answers provided. I advice you all to try it out and be a Problem Solver like him.

Sharing the links of some of our previous articles, which were based on the misconceptions we have in testing: