Agile Testing Days 2021
On today’s safari we roam the territories of the Agile tester, a shy creature not often seen in its natural habitat! So put on your best adventurer hat and follow me into their world…
On the 16th and 17th of November I attended the Agile Testing Days Germany in Potsdam and as the name says it’s all about quality and testing specifically in agile software development contexts. It was actually the first conference I attended in person for the SDA and all in all I have to say that I had a blast and would love to return in 2022 and maybe even spent more days there.
In the beginning it all felt a bit overwhelming just because I never really had the possibility to attend a conference of this scale and it was probably the biggest gathering of people I had been a part of for the better part of two years. And as every event in the last 20 months, this one had to find its way managing a still ongoing global pandemic situation and what it means to gather a lot of people in these times.
The two days I spent there about 350 other people were attending, too. The whole conference was conducted under 2G rules meaning only vaccinated or recovered people could attend and we were additionally provided masks, rapid tests for everyday and frequently asked to test ourselves (Tell a bunch of testers to test more…the irony was palpable 😃) to provide a safe environment for everyone.
From my perspective this worked exceptionally well and I never felt uncomfortable or that I was in space that was too crowded. Everyone was very conscious about the restrictions in place and even if they were not mandatory for biggest parts of the conference setup, masks were worn by a lot of people. Additionally, the organizers offered color coded masks: A blue masks indicated “I’m alright with getting near people” and black ones which meant “Give me some space, please”.
In the following I’ll give a short overview of some of the talks and workshops I attended. There was a huge diversity in the topics covered and and an absolute majority was a joy to listen to. There is so much to learn and so much to know that I can hardly give it justice here but like every conference this is as much about the topics as it is about the people you meet while attending.
Tuesday, 16th November 2021:
The first keynote I attended was Coming to terms with intelligence in machines by Dagmar Monett, who presented us her perspective into the current trends of AI from the point of view of a professor and researcher in the field. The hype and exaggerations of popular media around artificial intelligence were taken down quite substantially with the key thesis that the current second wave of artificial intelligence and it’s sub-disciplines like Deep Learning are still a lot of breakthroughs away from true intelligence and it is not even inevitable that intelligent artifacts will ever exist. AI is created through software and as such it should be subjected to the same practices and standards that we have established. Testing the system and its responses under conditions the AI was not designed to handle and under previously unknown and changing circumstances will be necessary as well as keeping in mind ethical aspects like making it clear to users when they interact with an artificial intelligence of any kind.
Next was a workshop that I had been looking forward to quite some time: Grow Your Technical Confidence facilitated by Elisabeth Hocke. It appealed very much to me as I am came from a non-technical background to testing and the story she told through the workshop resembled in parts my personal journey that I have embarked on since joining the SDA in 2018. We learned about how to contribute to Pull Requests even when you have not written code yourself before and what you can look out for and check along the way. As a little extra we got a short introduction on what developers use every day with the command line. For me this was not that much about suddenly gaining a lot more knowledge but more about confirming that I started on the right path and I would recommend the workshop if you come from the product development side of things and you want to get some more insight into contributing to quality and development.
In the afternoon, I wanted to have a look at what some of the present vendors were offering in the world of testing solutions and attend The Low Code Future of DevOps by Henri Terho. The title sounded a bit provocative and definitely garnered interest with some in the crowd. The basic premise was that with the rise of automatically generated boilerplate code used in software you would need to test more and more parts of your application from a higher level and the presenting company, Copado, offered an automated test framework that could record test cases and repeat them for you in a multitude of configurations and environments. In the demonstration the framework resembled existing solutions that use Gherkin to make tests more human readable, using keywords to drive the application under test.
Traditionally there is a big party in the evening of the Tuesday of the conference and this year was no different. As it is a themed party (this years theme was the 50’s/ Rock’n’Roll) people bring costumes and the best ones even get an award and free tickets for next years conference. I must disappoint the reader as I did not participate this year, but if I get to go next year you’ll get to see picture of me dressed up. For this year a link to the events best moments on Twitter shall suffice.
Wednesday, 17th November 2021
Day two started with a keynote addressing the topic of sustainability in our world of agile software development. Jutta Eckstein argued that Agile Comes with a Responsibility for Sustainability. The statistics that were presented showed a connection between the growing software market, that helps in some areas with increasing sustainability, also contributes to a rising demand in power world wide. From a testing pointing of view the argument was to include testing for efficiency in non-functional quality attributes and evaluating technologies not only in the light of how well they are suited to solve your project need but also what implications they may have in hardware demand and other environmental impacts.
An interesting approach and meeting format to share and help to permeate a learning and quality culture throughout an organization was presented by Zeb Ford-Reitz in his talk What is a Quality Dojo? From a premise of “If test driven development is so great, why does hardly anyone really practice it on the regular”, he started to ask himself why this happens and how to support and teach people about the usage of TDD. Resembling a loose community of practice approach but with a more defined goal, Zeb and his colleagues were able to create a long running low-impact project exclusively for the purpose of testing it together as a group in regular low commitment sessions. Communal learning and teaching is the focus of the approach and sessions are completely open to any and all roles in the company and attendees have the possibility to come and go whenever they can. The quality dojo seemed like a good tool to foster collaboration between different roles in a company and establish more confidence regarding a topic like Test Driven Development and an exciting tool to try out, if and when the circumstances in the organization are fitting.
Last but not least I’d like to talk about my personal highlight of the conference from the perspective of talks I saw: João Proença’s keynote titled Limitless within our boundaries.
João talked about a phenomenon that humans face when they are presented with an abundance of possibilities: the paradox of choice. Quickly summarized, humans in general prefer to have broad range of choices but this also impacts the rate of them actually making a choice in the end. Many choices lead to high expectations and increased considerations of opportunity costs which then actually decreases the your probability to make a choice at all. To counter this development teams could setup, examine and challenge constraints when creating new products, to limit the amount of choices they have to make to improve their efficiency. People in roles with a quality focus are in a good spot to help their teams setup good constraints as they already should be asking a lot of questions about the product to and sometimes it could help to questions more why a functionality is necessary and really establish if it is.
This talk really resonated with me because working in an environment that promotes the use of Open Source software is great in that it provides an abundance of tools and technologies that one can use to achieve their goals but sometimes this abundance actually feels like a block to actually commit to one specific way of implementation. Setting up clear constraints early so that your choice ion the end becomes easier can help navigate this jungle of possibilities.
Wrap up
As I said earlier, mentioning every talk or workshop I saw would make this post overly long, so I’ll try to summarize my impressions as a kind of closing statement.
The testing community as a whole is still not totally settled in the world of Agile development and people occupy very diverse roles and team setups in which their main emphasis is the quality of the products. The focus is till on finding ways to promote a quality culture and testing in collaboration throughout teams and organizations without having the classical responsibilities for quality assurance established as its own department. This results in testers having to broaden their technical as well as their management skills as they are often needed to test more in a shorter span of time as well as plan test strategies and needs.
From a tools perspective there were some offerings that focused on a low code approach and in general to ease the “burden” of testing. How that fits with the approach of promoting a quality culture remains to be seen as with that mindset testing should not be a burden but an activity that is vital to the process of creating better products in collaboration
Personally, the conference provided the perfect opportunity to meet more people that have quality as the main focus for their work and learn from their very different views and perspectives on it and how to achieve higher standards in your testing. Personally seeing people like Janet Gregory and other icons if the testing community was an inspiring opportunity to learn and I’d love to repeat that in the coming years.
