One of the observations I’m seeing a lot in the Testing community is the desire and passion to experiment with ideas. This is not new, there have always been people exploring and experimenting with ideas, from test case production to test reporting.
But it feels to me like it’s becoming more mainstream to experiment; this could be the knock on effect of people moving to agile ways of working, but I suspect it’s because the old standards and best practices weren’t/aren’t working for people anymore.
As companies and teams strive to deliver greater value, exceptional service levels and game changing products they are also striving to do this delivery in ways that work best for themselves.
It’s no longer acceptable to apply a “standard” or “Best Practice” to your work. Work is becoming diverse, information based, lead by ideas and innovation; as such there’s few formulaic ways of solving problems.
Instead teams are experimenting, finding what works for their context and pushing the boundaries of what has been done before. It feels good to be writing about this. It feels good to be part of Software Testing right now as we strive to find out why we are drawn to testing, why it’s becoming increasingly popular and why the nature of testing is changing.
I’ll be at EuroSTAR this week with a specific lense on my views. I’ll be seeking out new tools, techniques and approaches. I’ll be chatting to people who are pushing the boundaries and doing new and interesting things. I’ll be looking to expand my views on Testing and looking at how other people are solving hard testing problems.
So if you’re at EuroSTAR this week and fancy chatting about what you’re doing..I’m all ears.
I believe people are settling down in to their own way of working and letting their own standards emerge. This takes time, patience, a keen eye for details, an environment for rapid change and a willingness to admit when things aren’t going well or when ideas didn’t work.
It sounds like a growing number of people aren’t pushing for standards too quickly (if at all) or looking to set hard and fast rules of standardisation. And this feels positive.
I’ll no doubt write about some of the cool stuff I’ll see at EuroSTAR 2011. It looks like a really good lineup.
Hi Rob,NIcely written consise post, thanks.Although there are great ideas and sources of learning available to us, I think that there is a growing need to question our methods and not simply accept and adopt ‘best practices’ in our testing efforts, something which I recently tried to explain my feelings onhere. The main theme of my talk at EUROStar is the fact that Software Development process change is an evolutionary process, teams need the freedom to incrementally evolve their processes over time through questioning their methods and trying new ideas. The main reason for me for attending conferences is to gain inspiration from others on ideas that can inspire these evolutionary changes in my own methods. I do this by not simply by taking things as wrote but by merging the thoughts of others with my own to generate new and exciting ideas, something which Jurgen Apello nicely describes as the “Mojito Method”.I look forward to catching up with you at EUROStar and sharing some ideas.Adam.