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What are test strategies?A test strategy is a means of informing what your testing will look like. A test strategy will detail the approaches that you'll use, the structure of your testing, how you will report on your testing, any sources of oracles or heuristics that help drive your testing, and how you actually plan to execute your testing. A good test strategy evolves as a team and their approach to software delivery evolves.  How might you format a test strategy?Test strategies can be drawn as models such as a mind map or diagram, written up as a single page strategy that provides a dashboard summary, or more commonly be written as a document with different subsections detailing different activities. What's the value of a test strategy?Sharing test strategies helps make information related testing and its activities visible to stakeholders and all the project members. The activity of creating these artifacts allows us to test our ideas and refine our strategies to improve. Are there any pitfalls?Needless documentation is waste. Make sure you only capture what is important and don't drown others in pages and pages of documentation. On the flip side, too little information would make the strategy too vague, and this will lead to assumptions. Things change. Strategies evolve as we learn more and progress through the project, so you should treat these artifacts as a living documentation and not hard rules.

So what's performance testing?Performance testing is testing that focuses on revealing information related to performance risks. When performance testing, we are looking at different variables that can affect a system such as the amount of users using the software at one time, the amount of data used in a system and how it is accessed, the amount of transactions hitting the servers at one time, or how the system is architected and the resources it uses. When people talk about performance testing, the most common meaning behind that term tends to be related to testing that focuses on user load risks.  Have you got any examples of performance testing?We've got load testing where you have an expectation on the anticipated load expected for the software, then testing the software with a load of that amount for a duration of time to see how the system handles that. Stress testing where you continuously increase the load on the software until the software reaches a point of failure, which tells you the maximum load in which the software can reach before breaking, and SOAP testing, where you run the load for a much longer duration of time to see if there are any extended problems focused around memory leaks.  And what's the value of performance testing?It enables teams to understand the underlying performance of their system and troubleshoot any issues. The information identified may be used to mitigate performance related issues and improve a product's quality.  And what are the pitfalls?Often, performance work is pushed to the end of the delivery. Fixes found at that stage often require fundamental changes to the implementation, which is often unfeasible for many teams and organizations. Your performance testing has to be comparable in execution and set up to how you expect your product to be used in production. Otherwise, you'll get false information.

Leadership is the action of leading a group of people. It can also be seen as a role and skill or set of skills. A good leader is someone who is honest, has empathy, inspires people, is a great communicator, enables people, has good decision making skills, takes accountability, has passion for their work, leads by example, etcetera. Leadership is also associated with coaching, mentoring, and teaching.  Have you got any examples? A good experience that I had with a leader was when I had a challenge at one point in my career. The leader spent time coaching me and mentoring me, helping me to reach my own solution to my challenge. They were empathetic with my situation, and I could easily see they really cared about helping me and were open and honest with their opinions.  What's the value of leadership?Having a strong leader can be so impactful to you doing the best job you can. A strong leader will boost morale, create a safe space for learning and growing, encourage mistakes for people to learn from, and will coach and mentor you through any challenges you face, supporting you to solve your own problems. Being a strong leader can also be hugely rewarding too, Be it in supporting people in their career, mentoring someone in the community to help them grow as a tester, or in helping your team with a strategic direction, it'll be rewarding for your own morale and for your own career growth too.  What are the pitfalls?It's still fairly common for leadership to be confused with management. Leadership is different from management. Anyone can be a leader at any point in time. Many managers are not leaders. They don't possess the leadership skills that they should have. I'm a believer that managers should be people who have leadership skills, but often, this isn't the case.

The more 99 Second Talks, the better!

Learn about Test Strategies in 99-Seconds

It wouldn't be a TestBash without our famous 99-Second Talks!

Experience the core fundamentals of coaching

In this talk Vernon talks about what the work of a professional coach looks like and how it might manifest itself in the Quality Coach role.

Learn how to create and expand your testing toolbelt with new tools and tool sources

Stuart Day and Vernon Richards joined us at ReTestBash UK 2022 for a live Q&A session after their talk What is Quality Coaching, Why Should Testers Care And What Difference Does It Make For Our Teams?