Testing knowledge base

Today, my team and I had Study Group as usually every Wednesday and we were talking about metrics.

You know, there are a lot of metrics that can be used in every project but it didn't used.

Most interesting thing: I did a small survey among my team's member about what metrics did they use and how was it used by them and project team.

Details of survey:
1. Didn't use - 50%
2. Used but there was not significant value from this (ISO methodology were used) - 37.5%
3. Used and it gave real value to the project. - 12.5% 

Amount of people that were take into consideration during survey: 8

So, what does it mean? Many people don't understand what metrics are and how it should be used!

How do you use metrics in your project?

From one company to another I've been seen that Test Teams have some problems with productivity and motivation.

There are a lot of reasons for these things:

• unclear requirements and job that needs to be done
  
• manual (monkey) job
• there is no progress in developing testing knowledges
• and so on

How my team and I overcome these obstacles?

Zone-Model and Study Groups.

Study Group is already described by me. So I would like to emphasize my attention to Zone-Model.


Key principles:
1. Test team is self-organized in one zone.
2. 10 hours for sharing activities per week for team in zone. Please note: there won’t inefficiency here because sharing activity will be performed in rotation by projects and hence always some project will have extra pair of hands and therefore benefits.
3. 10 hours is flexible and should be spread during week by team members. Workload and current tasks should be taken into account. Namely, team members should communicate each day and plan sharing activities. For example: Monday – 3 hours, Wednesday – 2 hours, Thursday – 2, Friday -  3 hours.
4. Monitoring is fulfilled by test manager.
5. Daily meetings for every zone to plan activities for current day and further days (~5-15m).
6. Retrospective each month to take actions and improvements (~1h). One of points to be discussed is changing team members between projects.

Risks:
1. Team members aren’t supported activities. Mitigation: Please see key principle 4, 5, 6.
2. Planning and estimation of future work isn’t done and hence impact on sharing activities. : Please see key principle 4, 5, 6.

You would probably know that study process is one of key principles to be on the top of you profession. Moreover, this is motivation and inspiring stuff. Learn process should be ongoing both in life and at work.

When I took over Test Manager responsibility I saw that this process wasn't set up at all. So I strongly decided to set up this process.

What I did.

My Team and I had a set of discussions around study group. This idea is not new but nobody I know set it up in testing. Well, My team and I agreed to create Study Group.

Principles is following:
1. Study Session should be on weekly basis.
2. Study Session should have timebox. We defined it as 1 hour.
3. There should be trainer that prepare defined topic every time.
4. Half of session is theory and another is group practice.
5. Topics should be defined by Test Team by the end of each study session.
6. Materials should be gathered and uploaded to some server.

I would like to say that it's good practice and it works perfectly for whole team as team building aspect.

Mostly internet and web applications represented by following architecture:

• Presentation layer. The layer of an Internet application that provides the GUI (graphical user interface).
• Business Logic layer. The layer that models your business processes such as user authentication and transactions.
• Data Access layer. The layer that houses data used by the application or that is collected from the end user.

Therefore testing will be conducted around it.

1. Statement coverage
2. Decision coverage
3. Condition coverage
4. Decision-condition coverage
5. Multiple-condition coverage
   

1. Equivalence partitioning
2. Boundary-value analysis
3. Cause-effect graphing
4. Error guessing