test objects design

My name is marekj (and yes, I am available for Hire especially if you have a failing project with high level of cynicism and resignation).This blog is about experiments in lean, agile, cooperative software production infrastructure building. Since, there are never enough people on the project, never enought time, never enought money in the budget one looks for shortcuts, more shortcuts, better shortcuts. One looks to automate, automate better, automate everything - most of all one looks to automate communication. So, I am interested in building infrastructures to support “Cooperative Games of Invention and Communication” and I think the place to do it in an organization is by building Test Teams. Let me explain with a quote:

“‘Suppose that…’ — we don’t want to say that software development is like something else; (…) “Suppose it was just itself, and you didn’t do any analogies for a moment, what would you see?”

“And so, what I came up with, (…) is that there are people who are inventing and communicating in the face of a problem that keeps changing, a solution that keeps changing, technology that keeps changing, out from under them all the time. They’ve got some end goal, they have to deliver this piece of software, they have to set up for the follow-on project, while all that there is as actions are invention and communication. And so I found it useful to talk about it in a vocabulary of a cooperative game.”

I picked the above quotes from the IT Conversations Interview with Alistair Cockburn (Transcript) as a way to engage you into looking at a role a Software Tester could play in a context of cooperative games programmers play. It all started in 2002 when I stumbled upon an article in SD Magazine by the very same Alistair Cockburn entitled “Games Programmers Play” and I started reasoning about my role as a Software Tester on a Development Team.
In the context of Inventing and Communicating what could I say, is the role of a Software Tester? What could I provide, contribute to make the game work for all? If in this game the moves I make consist entirely of inventing and communicating then how do those moves look like? What is the infrastructure that affords the moves?
In my daily activity there is a lot more going on than writing and executing tests. I spend a lot of my time communicating with various people on the team. With each person I use a different language, different vocabulary. With managers I talk about time, delivery, percentages, results. With DBAs I talk SQL statements, data models. With Java developers I talk methods, exceptions, states. With customers I talk Use Cases, scenarios, happy-paths, colors, font sizes…
At some point I asked myself “What is the context for my activity as a Software Tester?” - If I was just a Tester in a classic waterfall approach I would receive a Functional Specifications document and I would start designing Test Cases that would attempt to validate functional features of a known set of entities but instead I find myself spending time sitting with developers in their cubicles and reasoning with them how a functional design should be and how to implement business requirments, how to specify behaviour. I find myself working with developers looking at the code, having in mind future integration and system testing, taking the big picture into account while looking at classes and SQL calls. I also find myself discussing requirements with Business Analysts, drawing diagrams on a whiteboard and talking on the phone with Customers about new features and helping them articulate their requirements for improving their software. - Are these activities the software tester should be doing? Perhaps. I find myself communicating, distinguishing, synthesizing, abstracting, analogizing. Am I doing Inventing? Not sure - but I’m definitely connecting people and clarifying their ambiguities. My moves are all about communicating, perhaps to make sure that there is communication on the team. So In this context I started looking that perhaps my job as a Tester is to Support the Games. If Software Development could be cast in the context of “A Cooperative Game of Invention and Communication” then how can Software Testers can support the infrastructe of those games? How can Testers support this process of Invention and Communication that makes the game work and worth playing?