July 2017 Summaries

The concept of a QA department in an agile company has evolved beyond its traditional role as a separate testing team. Instead, it now focuses on ensuring quality throughout the entire product development cycle, supporting all departments involved in creating and developing the product. This "new" QA department is integrated into the process from the beginning, adding value by doing research, thinking about user stories, and assessing quality risk analysis. By being an active part of the development process, QA can help create higher product quality that meets market needs, reducing debugging time and increasing ROI in development productivity.

In modern development environments, organizations that successfully implement testing practices have a significant impact on their ability to leverage automation. To achieve this, successful teams adopt organizational structures such as two-pizza teams, where each team is no larger than seven people and focuses on discrete units of work. Developers are accountable for testing their own applications in continuous integration environments, with quality engineers providing methodology and test suites. Talent plays a critical role, with everyone being an engineer to facilitate open communication and automation. The delivery chain should be treated as its own application, with DevOps+QA teams owning the process and responsible for efficiency improvements. Automation relies on integrated tools that work together seamlessly, and organizations must adapt quickly to support continuous evolution. By recognizing the impact of organizational structure on testing success, companies can build a sustainable, fast-moving environment and execute goals much faster.

Automated testing plays a crucial role in enabling successful Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines by reducing testing time, increasing consistency, and facilitating agility. Without automated testing, CI/CD chains would be incomplete, as it is impossible to achieve reliable software delivery without thorough testing. Automated testing also helps teams make the most of their resources, allowing them to focus on high-value tasks while automating tedious testing processes. The integration of automated testing into CI/CD toolsets is becoming increasingly common, with vendors recognizing its importance in delivering successful DevOps workflows.

Testing in Continuous Delivery involves shifting tools and knowledge to earlier phases of the engineering process, known as shift left, to ensure quality and prevent defects. This approach requires collaboration between developers, testers, and operations teams to create a strategy for the whole process, including simple testing notes during specification and automated tests throughout development. In testing, automation is key, with a focus on quick and stable quality feedback, while also leaving room for manual tests that are crucial from a business perspective. Operations phase involves collecting end-user feedback through application logs and metrics, and using techniques like canary releases to test features in production environments. The continuous delivery methodology has led to the emergence of DevOps, TestOps, and other related practices, which involve combining quality efforts across development and production environments.

To Develop, Or Not Develop`: A Tester's Perspective As a tester who doesn't consider themselves a developer, I have a different approach to problem-solving and testing. I find the unexpected results from combining code and systems fascinating, and I enjoy exploring the interactions between various components of an application. While I can write basic code and understand database concepts, I don't find writing extensive code or solving complex problems in coding as interesting as understanding how things work together and identifying potential issues. I believe testing is a multi-directional talent that involves experimentation, observation, planning, communication, and social engineering to address ecosystem-level problems. Automated testing is an essential tool for me, but I prioritize learning the basics of programming languages and methodologies over becoming an expert in a specific language. My goal is to understand what pieces of the application are doing and how they work from top to bottom, rather than getting bogged down in repetitive coding tasks. I find the process of testing and problem-solving more engaging than writing code, as it allows me to figure out amazing things and learn from those issues.

The author reflects on the growth of their engineering productivity team, which has recently rebranded from QA to focus on automation. They discuss the importance of having a dedicated product owner for automation projects, as this role helps set priorities based on business needs rather than just team interests. The author introduces the concept of an Automation Program Manager (APM), who assists in coordinating broad goals and working with automation product owners to build towards a shared vision. APMs help identify business needs, work with leaders to ensure testing is in place, and collaborate with product architects to understand the vision and plan for automation projects. The author emphasizes the evolving roles of test engineers, software engineers in test, and product owners in automation, highlighting the need for effective communication and coordination between teams.

The XCUITest framework is part of Apple's XCTest testing framework and allows for automation of user interface and overall user experience testing on iOS devices. UI testing is crucial for user-oriented applications, focusing on interface-based interactions with the app rather than internal operations. Key best practices for UI testing in XCUITest include utilizing the built-in UI recording feature to save time and provide reliable test code, recognizing sequence dependency in tests, and testing a wide range of user interactions to develop a detailed picture of the results. Additionally, it is essential to consider accessibility when performing standard functional and performance testing, as well as go beyond these to test for unexpected or unwanted results that may interfere with the user experience. The XCUITest framework makes UI testing easier by providing features such as precisely specifying user actions and automating tests.

As a development shop, Sauce Labs has developed an open source JIRA Cloud and BambooHR integration to help employees easily access their manager's information and office location without leaving JIRA. The project was started after a developer heard the IT team's request for a simple way to retrieve this information from BambooHR. The integration is entirely configurable and uses Flask Atlassian Connect, a helper framework, to make it easier to write such integrations. The project is now available on GitHub and includes a Heroku app.json file to facilitate deployment.