- There is a saying that “testing does not win popularity contests” referring to the nuance of being a messenger voicing the important issues that can sometimes be show-stoppers. Or party-poopers. However, being an announcer of “bad news” or lack of popularity can be not the worst thing that happens to a QA specialist. This week I was shocked (and it is difficult for me to not run into conclusions) when I read about Boeing whistleblower John Barnett found dead in a hotel.
“From 2010, he was employed as a quality manager at the North Charleston plant.”
“Mr Barnett said he had alerted managers to his concerns, but no action had been taken.”
“Boeing denied his assertions.”
It feels like Boeing was already in a quality crisis, and this case of John Barnett puts even more fuel to the fire.
- There is yet another popular saying that “QA is a question-asker.” And I love this one. Not only because Quality Assurance is a faulty term (as QA cannot assure quality or build the quality in), but also because it explains the essence of QA (or test engineer) work straight and simply by saying what they do. And even though everyone asks questions (and my 5-year-old daughter currently does that a lot more than I do). But asking good questions is something else. Therefore, some thoughts from AB Testing Episode 196: A Chat with Kat Obring clashed with my understanding of that:
“There is the other bit, however, where, and this has been the case in my entire testing career, I always found it somewhat baffling that people think they can build a career purely on what is generally regarded as the soft-skills.”
“That personally I would expect any professional in the field to have.”
“Because what do I do with a developer who can’t ask questions?”
“And that that is the basis of critical thinking, right?”
“What do I do with a developer who cannot communicate with people around them?”
In my opinion, a good question-asker (QA) does more than a simple communication. They spot assumptions, cognitive biases, and weights questions worth fighting until their ultimate answers. They think about thinking, they think about mechanics behind decision making, they use tools (models, heuristics, etc.) to think better or to remind stuff to themselves, they reflect upon their mistakes and they raise new questions from there. In my experience, not all question askers are good question askers, and it is a long way to get there. Question asking at professional level is not that shallow “soft-skill”.
- Another way to ask some good questions, collect some info, and come up with insights is surveys. One of my favorite surveys in testing published its PractiTest State of Testing report for 2024 (and this year I am a bit disappointed with it). Here are some of my subjective highlights:
- JIRA is the most popular tool? Whaat? 😀
- 60% of test specialists are not (yet?) using AI for testing.
- QA still focuses on process (testing), not on product (value to business). See QA metrics question which suggests only process focused metrics (and eNPS :D)
- In the context of Modern Testing, DevOps, Empowered Product teams, and other modern movements/practices, asking “Does testing have a say regarding release readiness?”, commenting 81% of YES as a good thing, and encouraging testing specialists to be bottlenecks in the process… sounds wrong.
- Another interesting experience from this week – I was invited to have a demo of Perfana directly from its creators Dylan van Iersel and Daniel Moll. To be honest, it is stickers to blame! Shiny Perfana stickers caught my eye on LinkedIn, I posted a comment cheering to get some, one message led to another, and I found myself watching the demo. Talking from my experience with performance testing in a CI/CD environment, Perfana would have saved me some precious time replacing a lot of hours in MS Excel spreadsheets that I used to track performance metrics for regressions. And, if you would like to hear more in-depth, Jakub Dering provides a detailed Perfana review capturing a lot of thoughtful nuances of the tool.
- Finally, something to try-out. Keeping up with a yearly tradition, Google announced its Google I/O event date with a puzzle game “Break the loop” and, well, it is highly addicting. I am glad there were only 15 levels… Have fun!
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