EuroSTAR 2014: Thursday In Review

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The final day of this year’s EuroSTAR conference began on a clear, crisp morning in Dublin, amidst an atmosphere which was surprisingly energetic, particularly considering the exertions of last night’s Conference Awards! Delegates seemed to be finding hidden pockets of energy to maximise their last chance to connect with other attendees.

Introductions in the auditorium were provided by Paul Gerrard, who explained that the morning’s keynoter Daniël Maslyn had unfortunately been taken ill yesterday. Luckily we had a highly capable replacement in the form of Shmuel Gershon. Paul joked “he didn’t volunteer; we found him!” but Shmuel was surprised and delighted to get the call. He wasn’t overwhelmed, despite having presented a track session on Wednesday, and managed to produce an excellent presentation from his repertoire.

Shmuel’s keynote was titled “Value: Why We Have It Backwards”. He looked at whether we’ve ever truly considered the role that software plays in our lives.

Citing examples from Phillip G. Armour’s 2003 book, The Laws of Software Process, Shmuel illustrated how humans have evolved the ways in which they store, transfer and apply knowledge through history. Over time, new methods have emerged: originally we encoded information in our DNA (a useful peristent medium, albeit one which is hard to deliberately modify!) and this has been augmented with our brains, tools, books and now software.

Bjarne Stroustrup, in his 2012 paper “Software Development for Infrastructure”, said “our civilization runs on software”, but more than that, we are dependent on it! And with so many safety-critical systems being driven by developed software, patches and workarounds may not be acceptable; what crises are going to arise purely as a result of software? Shmuel quipped: “You don’t want to be the person who ends up on the news for that… if there’s anyone left to make news…”

Shmuel proposed that software, rather than a product, is a knowledge-storage medium which allows users to convert knowledge into a binary stream for storage and future recall. We are so in awe of it that we will persist with it, even when we experience problems and crashes. Referring to our room full of engineers and testers, Shmuel said: “Civilization depends on *us* now!”

Channelling Voltaire (or possibly Spider-Man), Shmuel espoused that “with great power comes great responsibility”. As organisations, we need to transform to meet the emerging needs of our users, as the goals of our users are more important than the mere existence of our products. This means that we should always place the users at the centre of questions that we are asking about our product: if we’ve found a bug, we might rank it as unimportant, but is it important enough that users will need to know about it, or react to it in some way?

Reinforcing this paradigm, Shmuel told us that we should always make sure that (in whatever we do) the ends justify the means; but we shouldn’t forget what the end goal actually is! The goal is not to ship software; the goal is to store the most faithful representation that customers need.

It was an entertaining and thought-provoking keynote, all the more remarkable given the short preparation time and it being Shmuel’s first appearance as a headline speaker. I’m looking forward to his next time on the big stage – he’s certainly earned it.

We then had the chance to participate in a short series of track sessions, and I was delighted to get a chance to experience a presentation from Janet Gregory, entitled “Testing Traps to Avoid in Agile Teams”. Janet armed us with some of the expertise from her books, “Agile Testing” and “More Agile Testing”, which she has co-authored with Lisa Crispin.

In particular, the 45-minute session focused on five of the more observable pitfalls which she has observed within agile teams, and showed us ways in which we could spot the smells associated with these traps. The five traps that we examined were:

  • Waiting for Tuesday’s build – A team which claims it as agile, but is actually producing mini-waterfalls (which Janet termed the “ketchup effect”, where a massive chunk of work lands in one go). Testers should always have access to the latest development builds, and this can be enabled by ensuring that you have (and understand!) a continuous integration tool.
  • Testers Aren’t “Really” Part of the Team – When testing is not treated as “real” work, which isn’t estimated or tracked within the team’s velocity; or each story contains a generic “do the testing” task. This creates divide and disengagement within the team; get testers involved earlier, and make them one of Dinwiddie’s “Three Amigos” (a testing spokesperson who is involved in important story-related meetings and decisions).
  • Maintaining a “Quality Police” Mindset – Taking a prescriptive approach to bugs, by forcing everything to be logged in a defect tracking system (regardless of triviality) and siloing the team, often in a separate location altogether. This can lead to communication only occuring through conflict, or through notes within a defect report, where the developers offload all quality responsibility to the test team.
  • Trying to Test Everything Manually – This is a sure-fire way of ensuring that your test team is always over-worked, always has excuses to avoid potentially valuable meetings, and are doomed to continually work on an endless slog of regression testing. Automating as much of the trivial checks as possible, particularly low-level tests (with reference to the test automation pyramid), and building testability hooks into your products are good ways of focusing on the benefit that such systems bring to the team, and gives the testers more time to discover new information about the product through valuable exploration.
  • Forgetting the Big Picture – Agile trains us to work on small stories, which can blind us to the “tip of the iceberg”. We need to additionally consider the feature-level, release-level, and system-level impacts that our changes might have caused. Remember that we ship our code as complete units, not as individual stories!

I highly recommend looking through a copy of the slides if you didn’t attend (for EuroSTAR attendees, you can find all of the slides within the Dashboard section of the EuroSTAR website, once you’re logged-in). If you’re working within an agile team, you’ll almost certainly spot an anti-pattern that you recognise from your own organisation, and Janet’s suggested solutions may give you an extremely applicable take-away from the conference.

The closing keynote came from Zeger van Hese. “Everything is Connected” brought together the conference themes of diversity, innovation and leadership to see how these overlap with each other. Zeger discussed how his personality profile (16personalities.com) of ENFP makes him perfectly placed to be capable of identifying obscure connections, and how he’s in good company (apparently Leonardo da Vinci was an ENFP).

Zeger realised that not only are the conference themes of diversity, innovation and leadership highly interconnected, but they are in a tribar formation – an impossible shape which should not exist. He looked at how team diversity often struggled to counter biases such as affinity bias and social comparison bias (our tendency to surround ourselves by people who are similar to us). He drew parallels to lesson number 283 in the “Lessons Learned in Software Testing” book, which states that injecting variety in as many elements of testing as possible is essential to creating effective, diverse testing scenarios. However, diversity is not without its dangers.

Zeger examined how multi-cultural teams certainly differ from monocultural teams – sometimes they are more successful, sometimes they are less successful, but they’re rarely the same. Therefore if you’re hoping to exhude diversity within your business, this requires careful coaching and management if you don’t want to make things much worse than they were before.

Zeger looked at definitions of great leadership, using Jerry Weinberg’s definition as a starting point: “The process of creating an environment where people become empowered”. Change is often difficult though; we saw many examples of times through history where great ideas were rejected, often due to the status-quo bias, where anything different from the current way of thinking (or working) is hard to reconcile as being both new and useful.

We also looked at the phenomenon of “creative abrasion” (from Gerald Hirshberg), where great things can happen with peer collaboration if you inject enough diversity for a team to become productive, but not so much that it leads to destructive conflict.

After Zeger’s talk, Paul Gerrard returning to the stage, thanking everyone for attending, and with special thanks for the programme committee, the Test Lab assistants (who climbed on-stage in their lab coats), exhibitors, and everyone who presented a keynote and tutorial. I’m sure Paul wasn’t the only one who was getting a little emotional! Paul also revealed the results of the vote for the conference Do-Over Session.

The winning session was Declan O’Riordan‘s “What? Why? Who? How? Of Application Security Testing”. I’ve seen the talk previously and I can entirely understand why those who went to it would recommend it as a must-see session for the other delegates, it’s a real wake-up call for those who try to insist that security is “not my problem”.

This inevitably led to the hand-over ceremony, where next year’s programme chair, venue and theme were announced. We discovered that EuroSTAR 2015 will be held in Maastricht in the Netherlands from 2-5 November, and Ruud Teunissen introduced us to next year’s theme of “Walking the Testing Talk”. If you’ve been inspired by blogs, books or conference speakers, and you’ve applied their advice in your own environment, the submissions board would love to hear from you about the challenges that you faced in leading by example. The deadline for submissions is 6th February 2015.

Following another excellent lunch (another big thumbs-up for the quality and variety of food on offer), I’d volunteered to help in an afternoon workshop by Graham Thomas and Phill Isles, entitled “Programming for Testers – It is easy!”. I’ve seen some intensive programming classes before, but at just 90 minutes long, it was a bold challenge to attempt to impart a beginner’s knowledge of Python in such a short session.

Graham and Phill managed this admirably, by utilising several methods. Firstly, there was an achievable and enticing end-goal for attendees: a USB robotic arm, which (via a bluetooth connection) we would make move by using a Wii remote!

We started from a completely clean slate, taking people through the steps of installing and cofiguring Python and an IDE on their systems, pushing past a simple “Hello World” and onto common constructs such as accepting user inputs, iterating through loops, branching with if/else blocks, and writing our own checks in code. Needless to say, with a room full of testers, there were a number of programs which failed when we started trying to exploit the inputs of our programs!

Although the class was brief, it inspired attendees with a good introduction to Python syntax, some useful reference material from Graham’s website, and the motivation and ambition to take things to the next level. Andy Stanford-Clark’s keynote had shown us some examples of the power of portable programming; Graham showed his own example of a high-definition time-lapse comprised of thousands of photos which had been captured by a Raspberry Pi with a camera on-board. I’m planning to make my own one of these in the near future!

With the conference itself concluded, there was no time to be downhearted as we were whisked off for a tour of the Guiness Storehouse. We were led on a guided tour around the original brewery in St James’s Gate where Arthur Guinness first signed his 9000-year lease for the premises (one of the wisest business decisions I’ve ever seen). We were also given the chance to pour (and drink!) a pint of the black stuff for ourselves, and had the chance to visit the Gravity Bar, one of the best panoramic views over the night-time cityscape of Dublin. It gave us a chance to reflect on an amazing week of conference events, and of course we’re already looking forward to next year’s EuroSTAR in Maastricht.

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