Learning to Ask for Testability - Nicola Owen

When I started in my new team, I realised that I was the first tester the team had had. Up until that point, the only testers that were involved with their project were the ones that tested in Production after they were finished building the feature.

The thing is, testability had never been an issue for this team - until I joined. My first few weeks were spent asking for things, asking for test data, asking for more test data - eventually asking to learn how to create test data (from a separate team). I asked to learn how to edit the HTML, to test different scenarios because the test data was missing. I wanted access to GitHub so I could see the pull requests being done to address different stories in JIRA.

I wanted it all! I was a demanding tester.

And after a while, things got easier. I was even able to help developers make testability easier on their local machine, so they could debug faster.

I want to share my story on how I learned to ask for increased testability, and how I learned what exactly testability means after I realized this what I had been focussing on this whole time.