Tester developer interaction

Tester and Developer Interaction

Liang Gao

Sigma Resources & Technologies, Inc.

Agenda

Tester and Developer relationships development

Which point tester and developer should interact during the release process

Test team and development team interaction

Quality and process control

Tester and Developer

A love and hate relationship

TestManager

Tester and Developer - Hate

Testers are confused, do you want me to find more bugs, or do you want me to find less bugs.

Developers don’t want to be bothered: “Stay away from me, can I just focus on coding?!”

Tester and Developer – Hate -2

Developers don’t want to do any test

Testers don’t know how to test – How can I know what to test?

Tester and Developer – Love

It is not actually love, it is that we depend on each other to get our work done

We both have one goal: less bug on the customer side.

Tester and Developer – Love - 2

Tester need to get testing requirement from developer

Tester need to confirm bugs from developer – Junk bugs are counter-productive.

Developer need tester on the system level view, on the module dependencies

Developer need tester to know how customer use the system (a good tester is equal to a good system designer)

Relationship Development

Unlike us, developer is a subject expert lacking a system point of view.

Developer talks with different languages (white box language)

Us Developer

系统屏幕上有乱码 我那个对象创建以后里面有一个函数的输入验证的不对

系统当机了 用 GDB 看了，那个 API 传出来的时候给我的就是空指针， 这个问题不是我需要解决的！

Communication is hard because

Our technical expertise are different

Engineers are good at doing, bad at talking

Engineers are stubborn

We like Ping Pong things, if not, we lose our patience very quickly

The result: we don’t trust each other

Communication is hard because

GOOD TESTERS Get up to speed quickly Domain knowledge Ignorance is important

GOOD DEVELOPERS Thorough understanding Knowledge of product internals Expertise is important

Communication is hard because

GOOD TESTERS Model user behavior Focus on what can go wrong Focus on severity of problem

GOOD DEVELOPERS Model system design Focus on how it can work Focus on interest in problem

Communication is hard because

GOOD TESTERS Empirical What’s observed Skeptics

GOOD DEVELOPERS Theoretical How it’s designed Believers

Communication is hard because

GOOD TESTERS Tolerate tedium Comfortable with conflict Report problems

GOOD DEVELOPERS Automate tedium Avoid conflict Understand problems

Tester should take the responsibility

Because we understand customer

Because we have more interface within the company

Tester Customer

Development Manager

Documentation Team

Product Manager

SE/Support

Build Trust with Developer

Be polite

Response fast Emails Bugs Request/helps

Speak up Design and Review meetings Email threads

Show your technical expertise to impress them

3 Occasions to interact with Developer

Getting test requirement

Control test case quality

Bug

Getting Test Requirement

Tester join the design phase review meeting

Give design feedbacks from customer/system point of view

Easy of use Corner case user scenarios

Give testability feedbacks Testability for faster and easy of debugging and

reproducing bugs Testability for automation consideration

Control test case quality

Developer’s checklist

Invite developer to attend test case review meeting Increase code coverage

Bug

The universal language between tester and developer

Reproduce If possible, face to face

Fix verification

Bug fix code check in code branch control

Interaction between Managers

Pre-communication on acceptance testing

转测试 check up

Accept new version update

Pre-communication on acceptance testing

Communicate with Dev manager, if those test cases fail, testing team has the right to reject release

Need to be blocker test cases, if fail, majority of the test case can not run.

转测试 check up

Unit testing done?

Auto regression done?

Static code analysis done?

Accept new version update

When can a testing team accept a new updated software version?

Is it an Agile development (XP programming)?

Frequent update increase regression work load, and introduce regression bugs

Need to be firm on when to accept release – reduce your engineers repetitive work

Process and Quality control

Goal: reduce the developer and tester interaction time Increase the developer and tester interaction quality

Process and Quality control

Tester attend design meetings # of accepted suggestions tight to KPI

Developer attend test case review meetings # of accepted suggestions tight to KPI

Process and Quality control

Check out 私有代码库

代码同行评估

内测

Bug 修复

代码 Check in 评估会

研发 测试

新特性代码 Check in 流程

转测试

测试人员参加

同意否决

反馈意见

开发

Process and Quality control Bug 修复代码 Check in 流程代码 Check in 流程

研发 测试

Check out 私有代码库

Bug 修复

代码同行评估

Bug 验证

代码 Check in

不通过 通过

修改意见测试人员参加

Process and Quality control 代码库 开发 测试

反馈意见

手工第一轮

手工第二轮

手工第三轮

手工第四轮

开发新特性

允许新特性代码 Check in

发布日期

只允许 Bug 修复 Check in

只允许重大 Bug 修复 Check in, 中等以下 Bug 不修复，会放在 Releas

e note 中

Tips for Testing and Dev Manager

Need to both agree goal is to release the product on-time with Quality

Need to know outside the product organization, they don’t know the difference between us

Need to know and understand each other’s working flow and process

Dev manager need to let your team understand the important of unit-test

Tips for Boss

When do scheduling, give enough testing time

Quality VS time to market, give the guidance of the whole team what to balance.

Use testing group as tool and service to the overall product quality, not a service to the dev team.

Summary

Have developer friends makes your life easy

Tester should be pro-actively build trust with developer

Put your smile on! And communicate….

Summary

Thank you!Any question, please contact Liang Gao

E-mail: [email protected]