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Track Talk Th12

Dark Testing: Anti-Patterns and Failure Stories in Testing

Szilard Szell

13:45-14:45 Thursday 13th June

I work as a Test Coach in a large organisation. Last Friday, after a week of PI Planning preparation, seeing that all Test improvement initiatives were down-prioritised by the organisation (the ART), I cried out loud “What am I doing here? This is just wasting my time!”. I shared my pain in my Agile coach team. They stood up to help me emotionally, telling stories of their own Agile coaching failures, the stories of how Agile implementation is broken. They called these stories “the Dark Agile”. This gave me the idea to turn to our testing community of practice, and ask them for their Dark Testing stories. Surprisingly, in 15 minutes, I have received 32 answers, 32 different testing smells.

In my presentation, I would like to share some of our stories with analysis of why these patterns could be seen as “normal” within the organisation (while they are not!). I will also give ideas on how to solve them with proper change management, coaching or technical solutions

A few Dark Agile stories:

  • Asymmetrical testing: Tests are run in different pipeline or outside of the development pipeline and the deployment happens no matter what is the test case results
  • KPIs Tricked: CI blocks deployment unless unit tests have 70% line coverage. So… developers wrote the unit tests, but without any assertions whatsoever, so essentially the tests were running without actually testing anything.
  • “Following a plan over reacting to change”: creating a massive testing plan, to be treated as the holy bible against which progress is measured.
  • WaterScrumFall: The backlog has “Testing” Features that are surprisingly “spill-over” to be finished in the next Increment. Oh, in case there is not something more important to do
  • Test-Last-Thinking: Definition of Ready does not include test thinking. It is an afterthought only

What you will learn

  1. Even testing practices might look great on the surface, dig deeper to see if the problem was really solved
  2. You are not alone, faking is just much easier then doing it properly. Recognising Dark Testing patterns is half the way to solving them
  3. Stakeholder and whole team support is needed to bring light instead of Darkness into testing

Session Details

  • Intermediate
  • 1 Hour
  • Includes 20mins Discussion
  • Mistakes & lessons learnt
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Check out this video from Szilard Szell to hear more about his talk, ‘Dark Testing: Anti-Patterns and Failure Stories in Testing’.

We look forward to welcoming you to EuroSTAR 2024.

Session Speaker

Headshot of EuroSTAR 2024 speaker Szilard Szell

Szilard Szell

DevOps Transformation Lead – Eficode, Finland

Szilard is a DevOps Transformation Lead, Test Coach and SAFe 6.0 SPC at Eficode. He has years of experience with DevOps transformation especially in the telco industry. He also worked as a team lead, assessor, trainer, facilitator, and coach in test automation and testing process improvement areas.

Szilard is very much involved in the testing community. He is active in the International Software Testing Qualifications Board (ISTQB) working groups and a member of the Hungarian Software Testing Board (HTB). For many years, Szilard have been working on and supporting conferences like HUSTEF, UCAAT, and EuroSTAR, and Eficode’s very own The DevOps Conference (TDOC). In his personal life, he enjoys kayaking on the sea, playing with LEGO and being tested by his teenage daughter 🙂

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