Callum Akehurst-Ryan
Staff Quality Engineer
He/Him
I am Open to Speak, Write, Teach
Hi I'm Callum, a software tester and quality coach in London. I talk about exploratory testing, test strategy, diversity & inclusion and building testing in agile teams / startups.
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So where do we start as testers moving into this quality engineering space? By bookending development (coding) and being a part of the start and finish of things.
Working as a quality coach or a senior tester is an interesting role, the role may not come with in built authority and so you live and die by the influence you cultivate.
When I’m coaching teams, I usually let them know that we should have an opinion of what we’re aiming for in terms of depth from the start.
Test design is a mechanism that we use to ensure that what we're looking at is actually useful for people. It is a way of cutting down what we might explore or test for to ensure that our tests are really useful to people. And that's not just in terms of, exploration. That can be in terms of our automation as well.
The purpose of our test design is to help people understand what it is we're covering, what it is we're testing, and what is it they're going to find out about the system from our testing. Because we want to share that information, that useful information, to help the team understand the quality of what's being built. And the whole reason we design our tests in the first place, it's not necessarily for us. It's to share that with the rest of our team so they can help go, oh, have you thought about this? Or, hey, maybe this isn't a priority for us right now. So that's the key thing to think about there.
Test plans can mean all sorts of different things. It could be our approach. It could be how we're testing, or it could be what we're testing. It could be a series of scenarios or a series of tests as well.
Testing is the activity we use to gather information.
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Software testing is a way of providing information (and evidence) about something, allowing for a meaningful discussion / decision to be made on its quality*.
*Where quality relates to it being fit for purpose or “good enough” for now.
