That Voodoo That You Do: a #30DaysOfTestingTestability Entry

Hopefully, you are having some fun with me as I keep this going. This past week was a bit much leading into my daughter performing High School Musical (her last high school drama production) so there was a lot of activity around that so I'm going to be a bit aggressive with the remaining days of March so I can rightly finish the 30 Days of Testability challenge (or at least get as close to finishing on time as I possibly can).

With that...

In your next story kick off session ask, ‘how are we going to test this?’ Share the test ideas and techniques that are suggested.

This was a fun experiment in that I did get to do this for a specific feature that was getting a Responsive update. There were a variety of features that hadn't been looked at as thoroughly in recent efforts (even before the responsive updates) so I got to ask this question quite a bit. The good news is my Engineering team is totally cool with me asking these kinds of questions. We did some brainstorming and I made some suggestions of ways we could better examine how the application is working.

- some ideas revolve around adding calls to the API so that I can query and set values without having to fire up a browser and look at a bunch of things on the screen.

- some ideas revolve around actual configuration enhancerments of an application so that I can tweak various things while I'm setting up a test environment.

- some ideas revolver around making sure that elements are named well (whenever possible) and that duplication is minimal. Additionally with that, do anything we can to avoid dynamically generating elements. If that's not possible, let's at least make sure that we have a mechanism in place to easily discover those values and utilize them.

The biggest benefit I find with these conversations is that the development team and I can get on the same page much more quickly. In addition, it also allows me to see a bit of writing under the board and better understand the app a layer at a time. That's a good outcome for everyone, if you ask me :).