The Testers Bubble

Do we test professionals living in our own Testers bubble? I think we do.

If I talk with people in the field, I uncover often communication pitfalls that makes us misunderstood by outside world. Our passion for quality makes us blind to view the world through the eyes of our customers/stakeholders. I will give you three areas where people often are missing the boat.

1. Quality

People in IT and specifically testers often describe quality as “the degree to which a commodity meets the requirements”. We build our test cases against those requirements and validate the outcome. We talk about the number of “bugs” and list down the “test coverage” in our reports.

If you ask a person on the street to give you and example of quality, he can tell you about his phone, car or his last flight trip. However, he will probably link this against a different set of measure points like:

• Iphone; expensive, luxurious, top of the line.
• Quality of Airline company; Cabin Staff Service, cabin seating, on-board catering
• Car quality; Performance and Design, Predicted Reliability, Overall Dependability

The same situation you have between different organisations. Example for a government organisation quality can mean that they do not want to be in the news because of a bug found in the Tax program. A security breach will probably have a high impact on the minister and his political party. However if you find a similar defect for an intra website it can mean the a low risk issue within not consequence

2. KPI

How many of you have validated the KPI of the Operational support team on requirements that can influence you testing?

• Customer service representatives often have KPI related with the “% incidents solved within SLA time” and the amount of customers supported within the hour (max 3 minutes per customer). These KPI should trigger us to validate the performance and usability requirements.
• Other example; we are currently not testing the security of the webpage however Operation has a KPI related to % of downtime due to security incidents.
• Last example; we have a large number of people complain about our “iphone app? In the review section, what shall we do what that information?

3. Finance Accounting

We testers are not accounting people however; our activities have a financial value. It is important to understand the financial process to understand the decision making process of you organisation. Let us start to explain that testing in an operation Expense and that testing does not have an ROI.

Before you shoot the messenger, think about the following account principals. Based on the accounting rules testing and fixing defects is an Operational Expense (Opex, the ongoing cost of operating a business). If you are building an application for your organisation that you can use for a number of years you can see that as a Capital Expense (Capex). This will mean that you can perform capitalise the product across a number of years.

To calculate your return of investment you need to retrieve a profit on the money invested. As listed testing, is an operational expense with zero value at the end. This means that Testing can reduce cost but you cannot make money out of it (forget the testing providers).

So why should care about above-mentioned points? Dynamics of organisation is changing and it will influence how we will perform out activities. Companies are going live with beta versions of their product to ensure that they outperform there competition. The growth of agile projects is outnumbering the waterfall projects and the Devops is the next step of breaking down boundaries. CFO are implementing rapidly choosing for OPEX business solution within their business model (moving away from own data centre to cloud based solution or subscription-based software models for tooling)

How we make prick the balloon and ensure we are ready for a changing world;

• Ask the right question at the start of the engagement (Porsche or KIA).
• Focus in the overall approach on delivering business value
• Use the business vocabulary and KPI's and link them with requirements under test.
• Align the Test resources (Hardware, licences) with the company's financial goals
• Deliver an efficient test process (remove waste) and drive cost-saving (automation, lean)
• Make the savings within your team visible
• Do not forget that your stakeholders are often not IT people, validate your communication message