Zoom Call with Greg Paskal

I was very honored to have an hour-long video chat with Greg Paskal, the author of one of my favorite books “Test Automation in the Real World – Practical Lessons for Automated Testing”

It was a great discussion in sharing our similar passions for testing, XPath, CSS, conducting interviews with candidates, vinyl records, as well as our similar up bringing’s with using Commodore Vic 20’s with cassette drives as means of storage!

Like his book, Greg provided some great advice during our call. One of those pieces advice came when asking what I had been up to lately, and when I mentioned about my new hire, what their responsibilities were going to be on the manual side of testing, he reminded me about the METS strategy he developed and that I did not have to re-invent the wheel.

METS (Minimal Essential Testing Strategy) is built upon the principal that tests can be prioritized from Critical to High, Medium and Low. This prioritization provides great flexibility to reduce as much risk as possible with the timeframe given. METS is an essential testing strategy utilized by many QA organization and recognized by the American Software Testing Qualification Board (ASTQB) as an effective testing strategy.

Greg (and I agree) recommends watching the presentation at METS Presentation and you can also pick up his mobile app in the Apple Store at METS Testing App

JIRA and TestRail Continued

As I mentioned last week, I participated in a very informative webinar put on by TestRail that discussed integrations with JIRA. One of the pieces that they discussed was the integration of JIRA beyond the bugs (which I already had in place) and how an add-on, on the Atlassian side for TestRail, can integrate additional work items. Because this was intriguing and potentially an efficient way to establish traceability between not only tests and bugs, but tests, bugs and stories, I had to get this in place. So, I worked with our IT staff to get this setup (5 minutes to do this tops) and now we have nice integration in place between TestRail and JIRA beyond the bugs. In subsequent projects, this is going to be awesome to show not only what the progress of testing is, but also coverage against stories in JIRA, as well as other work items. You can view the webinar at https://youtu.be/dPbhdbL9Wnw

After Work Team Event:
Ready Player One

If there is a lesson that I can pass on from this past week to those of you in positions of leadership, make sure to recognize your team’s efforts and successes. Our director does an awesome job at this, and a number of this past week after work, went and saw the Stephen Spielberg film, “Ready Player One.” This is a film adaption of the 2011 book by Earnest Cline. You don’t necessarily have to be a video game junkie or geek, to appreciate this well put together film.

The Software Testing Happy Hour S1E3 | The DevOps Edition

Software Testing Happy Hour is one of my new favorite Software Testing broadcasts. Although I don’t drink (personal choice and I don’t judge those that do), I like the organic dialogue that goes on between Brent Jenkins & Sneha Crews, the hosts of the show. This episodes edition was around DevOps and a couple of things that struck a chord with me during this broadcast:

• Brent quite simply put, “You can do Agile without DevOps, but you can’t do DevOps without Agile.”
• The tools that are used at organizations and that “some” organizations are guilty about buying tools, and magically thinking the tools will solve your problems. For years, I’ve been an advocate of building processes, then seeing if you already have the tools in place already, and if not seek out tools. Make the tools work for you, don’t work for the tools.

I think I’m going to be shipping them some choice brews from Washington State, as I hear that we have some of the best breweries in the U.S. 🙂

To view this episode go to The Software Testing Happy Hour S1E3.