{"id":191,"date":"2017-12-01T00:31:46","date_gmt":"2017-11-30T22:31:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/testhexen.de\/?p=191"},"modified":"2017-12-01T01:17:34","modified_gmt":"2017-11-30T23:17:34","slug":"about-unicorns-and-rhinos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/testhexen.de\/?p=191","title":{"rendered":"About Unicorns and Rhinos"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Agile testing days are over. I have not been there, but from Twitter it seems they happened in a different land \u2013 the Unicorn Land. Must be great there, all those helpful experts and friendly people, a lot of fantastic user names with certain message\u2026: <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/FriendlyTester\">@FriendlyTester<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/the_qa_guy\">@the_qa_guy<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/BADtesting\">@badtesting<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/chr_kram\">Testknight<\/a>, \u2026. Then I look out of the window. Grey. No colorful unicorns. Grey day to day fighting with my test job\u2026<\/p>\n<p>So what is so special about the Unicorn Land testing? Quite some time ago I read the article of \u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/siggeb\">Sigurdur Birgisson<\/a>, where he writes about \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/happytesting.wordpress.com\/2013\/02\/01\/agile-testing-unicorn-perspective\/\">Agile Testing \u2013 Unicorn perspective<\/a>\u201d compared to the real world, where the unicorns are grey and are called rhinos\u2026 While his point is about not falling into the ditch after great discussions and not getting out of it in order to DO something, I guess I would need a solid bridge to get across the ditch: my Rhinos live in a completely different land.<\/p>\n<h2>My Real Testing Land<\/h2>\n<p>In my testing land, the world looks a bit different:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Not about agile mindset \u2013 but about getting the requirements tested<\/li>\n<li>Not much about exploring \u2013 but about checking<\/li>\n<li>Not much about experts with fancy names \u2013 but formal hierarchies<\/li>\n<li>Not much about testing knowledge \u2013 but about\u2026 well here it gets special:<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In my work context rather often, I end up in the situation where I have a majority of business people in my team with little or no testing skills. But they have great other skills: they do know what is important. They do have a very genuine interest in that the result of the work is usable in day to day work. So you might have guessed it: I often work in V-model like projects usually in late test stages.<\/p>\n<p>But I can imagine, that you Unicorns have met those grey brothers and sisters before: your company has asked for a final test by the business department, your application interfaces with a backend system, where no agile teams are working yet\u2026 So you know the question: how can I (claimed to have some agile mindset) support the success of my test outside Unicorn Land?.<\/p>\n<h2>How to Color A Rhino<\/h2>\n<p>From my experience, to work with such a team you need to extremely carefully check what is the purpose of the test phase and then \u201csell\u201d it to the testers. Can you have some trust, that someone else covered the basics before (maybe the Unicorn guys, or maybe it is a COTS product (custom off the shelf) and we really only need to test very specific things? Is it more of a \u201clearning\u201d and not testing? Is it a test of data \u201cdelivered\u201d via some interface? This has to result in some visionary statement. In my current project I could call it \u201cThe product would work fine, if we did not config<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright wp-image-190 size-medium\" src=\"http:\/\/testhexen.de\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/drawn-rhino-1-300x196.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"196\" srcset=\"https:\/\/testhexen.de\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/drawn-rhino-1-300x196.png 300w, https:\/\/testhexen.de\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/drawn-rhino-1-768x501.png 768w, https:\/\/testhexen.de\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/drawn-rhino-1-1024x668.png 1024w, https:\/\/testhexen.de\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/drawn-rhino-1-307x200.png 307w, https:\/\/testhexen.de\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/drawn-rhino-1.png 1132w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/>ure too much\u201d \u2013 i.e. the focus is on testing the configurations of a COTS product\u2026\u00a0 in such projects I experienced several ways to \u201cagilization\u201d:<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Work on par<\/strong>: Your test strategy needs to build trust for the business people into the test object and you \u2013 \u00a0they need to believe that the test scope is sufficient. So ask the team what they think is really important. Learn to understand their reasoning and then extend it with own ideas and methods, and cast it into some strategy. Try to carefully extend that by pointing out what you think is also dangerous. But don\u2019t use technical terms. In my example of the COTS product, one would assume the product is tested a few thousand times before, so only test the extensions. Testing experience is: you also have to show that the extensions work together with the product and did not destroy the unchanged part of the product. Experience is, business people do have a strong interest into this.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Help them find the right tools<\/strong>: this sometimes is shocking for the testing community and for myself \u2013 but the most preferred test management tool in business units very often is Excel! But maybe you can convince them to have an easier life with other tools\u2026\u00a0 which then helps you in test reporting\u2026<\/p>\n<p><strong>Add on skills<\/strong>: do pair testing with them in the beginning and get them on the hunt. Not only the happy path is important \u2013 and they do know that from their real life. So ask them for their worst nightmare and then see if you together can follow that test.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Try to get the checking work into some machines<\/strong>! Making the testing stuff way more fun for the rhinos\u2026. More challenging, more diverse, \u2026<\/p>\n<p><strong>Explore carefully<\/strong>: why carefully you might ask. This is very often because at this stage of the project, change requests are NOT welcome. So you first need to create a space in which change is accepted, otherwise frustration is large. \u00a0And then use the space to explore. What happens: next time they want to be involved earlier! YippiYee<\/p>\n<p><strong>Work with project management<\/strong> to point out early involvement is great! And \u00a0get the team to ask their bosses!<\/p>\n<p>Is this already agile? No. But there are some of the characteristics in there looking at what Sigurdur mentioned.<\/p>\n<p>So, do you now have a flock of unicorns? No, but maybe some funny looking rhinos\u2026 and a good chance to combine fun and power to succeed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Agile testing days are over. I have not been there, but from Twitter it seems they happened in a different land \u2013 the Unicorn Land. Must be great there, all those helpful experts and friendly people, a lot of fantastic user names with certain message\u2026: @FriendlyTester, @the_qa_guy, @badtesting, Testknight, \u2026. &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,19],"tags":[16],"class_list":["post-191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-e2e-test","category-exploring-methods","tag-test-management"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/testhexen.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/testhexen.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/testhexen.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testhexen.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testhexen.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=191"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/testhexen.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":193,"href":"https:\/\/testhexen.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191\/revisions\/193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/testhexen.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testhexen.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testhexen.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}