Solving testing problems through a set of principles

My mind whirls, deep in thought, of how complicated building a product can be. The questions are endless. Why are we building this? Who are we building it for? How are we going to build this? What tests do I need to perform?

No wonder sometimes I feel lost and overwhelmed with the scale of task at hand. As I go through and discover the answers to these questions, problems start to come out of the darkness. Stakeholders push for more automation and less “manual testers”, the testing only focuses on “functional testing” and then when we finally release the customer says, this is not the product I wanted.

I start to think about how we solve these problems. The Testing Principles 101 is born. It consists of 6 principles that aim to describe the things that I believe are correct. For example, principle 5 is, “Making our Testing Visible is an objective of ours”. This particular principle has helped me come up with creative ways to showcase testing to stakeholders, such as creating a Test Plan Repository or defect trend dashboards. Resulting in an understanding from our stakeholders on why we need “manual testers”.

In this talk I want to walk through my journey of creating the testing principles. Explaining what problems I have come across and what the principles are trying to solve. Hopefully inspiring you to think about creating your own testing principles to solve the problems you are experiencing.