Episode 8: The Liberated Tester’s Mindset with Gunesh Patil

Why Didn't You Test That?

Welcome to episode 8 of the Why Didn’t You Test That? Podcast, hosted by by Curiosity Software's Huw Price and Rich Jordan! In this follow-up episode with Gunesh Patil, The Liberated Tester, Rich and Gunesh share their insights into what it means to be a liberated tester and how they approached the adoption of agile methodologies!
Rich and Gunesh propose the idea of using squads, working to a blank canvas, can obtain a better level of DevOps and agile ways of working. However, a lack of focus on spinning up teams to do integration testing ahead of bulky end-to-end testing, may lead organisations into a blinkered cargo cult way of working. The cargo cult way of working adds difficulty to sustaining a bi-weekly change cadence, by injected chaos in the system with every incremental change.
In terms of toolsets and architecture, a blank canvas helps squads see what’s not working and thus the challenges to face into. Gunesh suggests that emphasis needs to be on what’s possible to build rather than on the toolsets alone for avoiding sprints defaulting to mini waterfalls. This holistic approach enables stakeholders are to see and communicate requirements but also data dependencies.
At a high level, this boosts the success rate of a test strategy, as many angles will have already been considered, providing an outcome of good documentation rather than a reliance on head knowledge. In part, model-based testing gets teams making use of this documentation for initial component level testing. This leads to heightened collaboration between stakeholders.
With model-based testing, stakeholders are given the power to easily execute and comment on a system’s architecture at various stages, but also on the technical aspects of components. Isolation and integration can then be explored more freely with bulky end-to-end tests. This leads to a massive gain in time, quality and DevOps speed, and in turn, experimentation and feedback become standard and shared practice between test teams and stakeholders.
The Curiosity Software Podcast featuring Huw Price and Rich Jordan! Together, they share their insight and expertise in driving software design and development in test. Learn how you can improve your journey to quality software delivery, by considering how much do you really understand about your systems, and when things inevitably go wrong, why didn’t you test that? Spotify | YouTube | Google Podcasts | Amazon Music | Deezer | RSS Feed