want to stump Kristen Jack vony good luck Kristen loves puzzles and escape games really any situation where she can use her wit and the tools available to her to solve a problem she thrives somehow I came across um uh I think it was called doors where basically it's all these little mini puzzles where you have to solve the puzzle to be able to open the door and go into the next room and I was just hooked I have probably played hundreds of these games now so um yeah they're just they're a lot of fun and I think one of the things I like about them is that um they you know that you have all of the tools that you need to solve the puzzle as opposed to some of the puzzles that people like to solve that are sort of like lateral thinking where you have to like think outside the box and imagine things these you know all the tools are there you just have to figure out how to put it together Kristen has been interested in Puzzles from a young age but her journey into puzzles and escape games as an adult has led her to to some interesting intellectual places including an interest in a new language seems like there are a lot of Escape games that are Japanese and because of that I started to get interested in the Japanese language so I've been learning Japanese on Duolingo and it's fun now when when I'm playing a Japanese Escape Game you usually they will give you all of the clues in English but sometimes there will be like like a sign that's in Japanese and it was really fun for me the first time that I could read that what the sign said was Ramen I'm like I know what that says so that was really exciting it's not puzzling to see why Kristen became a QA manager and tester just like an escape game testers are always on the hunt for clues in an application as simple as finding them behind a hidden bookcase door the reason why I am a software tester and not a software developer is because I really enjoy being presented with sort of uh not a finished product product because of course it's not finished yet but a um a product that is um all all of the clues are there I guess you would say kind of like with the escape games so so somebody says here we've we've coded this new feature we need you to test it and a lot of times in my career I've discovered that even though we're supposed to have documentation about how features work a lot of times there's no documentation so it takes a lot of experimenting a lot of playing around and I really enjoy that I really enjoy the exploration part of trying to figure out how a feature works and then thinking what are some ways that I could test this or what are some edge cases that we might need to explore and then thinking are there any ways that I could break this um I think that's really really fun and I think that's different from what developers do and I appreciate developers so much because they are the ones that are building the things they are starting with nothing they're starting with a blank sheet of you know with no code on it and trying to figure out I need to build this feature how am I going to do that so that's that's really an admirable skill but my skill set is more exploratory figuring out how something works figuring out all the ways that it might not work and then trying those out this is the ready Tesco podcast brought to you by Applause I'm David carty today's guest is Master puzzle solver and test engineer Kristen Jack vony Kristen is an experienced QA manager and tester currently serving as the principal engineer in software testing at Paylocity she organizes systems and processes to support all areas of testing whether that's for improving Legacy software or supporting new software from the early stages of development Kristen also speaks at conferences and is the author of the book The Complete software tester Concepts skills and strategies for high quality testing so what does it take to be a complete software tester Kristen would know Kristen first of all congratulations on your book The Complete software tester so from a high level perspective what should a complete software tester look like today particularly as it applies to their skills and their competencies well the most important thing and this is often sadly overlooked is they need to be able to find bugs that's why we are software testers we are trying to find the bugs before the software is released and the customers find the bugs so that's absolutely the number one thing another thing that is very important especially these days is to understand apis and how apis work and how to test them so that's very important and then I would say the next level is test automation you need to be able to automate we cannot be with at the rate that software is being developed today we cannot get by on just manual testing we need test automation um and then finally it's very important for software testers to understand some of the adjacent um software testing areas such as security testing accessibility testing performance testing these are all very important and they are becoming more and more important each year right now you've discussed and you've written about six testing personas to avoid right so today we're going to talk about two in particular job security gym and Conference Connie I keep wanting to say Jim and Pam but it's Jim right so can you walk us through with those two personas look like sure so job secure and because he's been there so long he understands the application backwards and forwards he knows exactly how to configure things and what how things are supposed to work which is great but if the company starts to evolve as our all companies that need to survive do and they might have a rewrite of the application and in a new uh coding language or or they might be making some changes um job security gym sometimes feels like he doesn't have to really learn that he doesn't he doesn't have to learn automated testing or he doesn't have to learn automated testing with a new tool so what winds up happening is he's stuck sort of in in one place with his one skill set and that's very dangerous because as the company evolves he's going to wind up getting left behind and then conference Connie she's the one who's very very excited about new things she loves to go to conferences she loves to find new ideas learn about new tools and all of that is really wonderful but conference Connie will often come back to her workplace and not do anything about the new tools that she learned about or new techniques or sometimes this is sort of a variation of conference Connie she might go back to her workplace and say we need to scrap everything that we've done so far with our Automation and start all over again with this new tool so both of those things are very disruptive and both of those things are Connie is learning but she's not learning deeply Connie is not learning in such a way that she's actually going to be able to benefit her team so the thing that Jim and Connie have in common is both of them are not learning and growing right it's interesting because they are diametrically opposed in some ways but they actually have some similarities here so to go back to job security Jim this person brings a lot to the team right I mean they have some deep domain knowledge that can be really useful in that respect but there's also some negative so can we dig into a little bit more of what they bring to the team with respect to what they offer uh their fellow team members and what some of their weaknesses are there yeah so so the positives of job security gym are that he knows where all the bodies are buried as it were so he he understands you know all the little tips and tricks for if if something's not working correctly or what those bugs are that have been sitting around forever and nobody has bothered to fix and how to work around them he might also have knowledge about how to configure con uh complicated testing situations um so those are all real positives but the negatives are as as he falls behind as his skill set doesn't improve while what's needed for the job becomes more complex or more advanced um he's going to start to become a bottleneck he's going to be the guy that is continuing to do the old manual testing or using the old slow tool while everybody else is waiting for him to get his work done so that they can continue to move forward right and you said test automation is one of those skills that a complete software tester should have it's one of the things we talked about right off the bat so you know as time goes on more testers will be expected to embrace automated testing so this is an area where a job security gym in particular is likely to get left behind right oh absolutely manual testers but they're they're very few um they don't pay well they don't allow for good career advancement so you've got to learn how to automate I mean and if you know you're you're just as smart as everybody else is you know speaking to the audience here and and if other people can learn how to do it so can you so you gotta start right right now I've done the conference circuit before as have you it can be a great source of inspiration and ideas that kind of thing but that's kind of some of the challenge right how can the conference Connie Persona uh get a little bit more focused or a little bit more grounded to come back to their team or their organization with some real concrete actionable ideas um so one idea would be that conference Connie should think about what problems she's trying to solve before she goes to the conference so let's say for example on her team they realize oh we're we're struggling with our mobile automation we want to get better at mobile automation so she could go to that conference and sign up for um you know some of the presentations that are going to help her answer that question so then she can focus and she can start making lists of actionable information that she can take back to the team another thing that she could do if there's no particular problem that the team needs to solve she can go and while she's attending the sessions and taking notes she can be thinking about what what is an actionable step I could do when I get back to the team about this one thing that I'm learning and because she's so excited she's probably going to come up with like 20 different actionable steps but what she needs to do is you know maybe I'm on the the plane ride home she needs to be looking at what did she have on her list and picking maybe just one or two things to take back to the team and definitely it's not a great idea to to go back and say we need to completely rewrite our automation because that's just going to stress everyone out so don't do that I mean if if there's a real problem with the automation um then you know maybe you might want to say I'm going to do a proof of concept on this one new tool and then we'll discuss it afterwards something like that's okay right right and to that point about stressing out your fellow team members conference Connie can be perceived as a a dog chasing cars right there's always another bright shiny one coming around the corner right so if you are already conference Connie uh with all of these Grand ideas you come back with but you're trying to be more grounded you're really trying to actually make these things actionable what can she do to sort of fight that negative stigma that that might be attached to him or her uh I think she needs to um start building some trust so um so when she comes back if she's going to come back she's going to be excited she's going to be filled with ideas I I would encourage her to maybe write a blog post about it like if the the company has maybe a place where they can share those things or or just write a document but but then when she meets with the team just have one idea like hey everybody do you remember that problem we were having where we were having trouble figuring out how to parallelize our testing well I learned this one tip that I think will help us and have it be something that the team can adopt without a great deal of pain and stress and so when the team adopts that then they're going to say Hey you know conference Connie's got some good ideas like so you know maybe we'll listen to her a little more next time instead of oh no here we go again she's going to come back with 10 things that we can't use so I think it's just slowly building up trust that way right that makes sense now the Stark difference between these two personas it speaks to that devopsy kind of idea of evangelizing knowledge right and that all sounds good until you've got these two very very different types of people one is resistant to change but really digs in deep and absorbs information on a detailed level the other loves the idea of change but might struggle to implement it or kind of get to that next level uh or even understand it in a concrete way sometimes right is that how you see it and how can managers kind of affect change with these two personas and evangelize knowledge in a way that will really stick oh that's a great question and I think that that's something that a lot of companies struggle with because there's always going to be a tension between we need to grow and evolve and change and we need to keep things the way they are I mean and there's there's cases to be made for both sides of those things I mean leaving things the way they are ensures that your software is going to continue to chug along nicely the way everybody's expecting but um making sure that you're adapting and growing means that your your software is going to adapt and grow and provide more value which is what your customers are going to expect so I think the most important thing to do is to strike a balance between the two and make small incremental changes evaluate those changes and then you know come up with with what the next step is and continue to move forward and I think it's also very important and there are a lot of teams especially managers like to do this they like to come up with the big idea and expect that everybody's going to Pivot to the big idea but then they get distracted they think about something else and then the big idea is lost and the those who are trying to implement it are stuck with well what do we do now do we keep trying to implement the big idea or do we go back to the way things were so I think slow and consistent progress is the best strategy right and probably a case to be made for keeping things the same and implementing change at the same time right depending on the project or depending on the team even so definitely speaks to that what you're talking about striking that balance so when these personas hit the job market what are some immediate red flags that you can spot are there items on their resume or things lacking from their resume that really stick out to you right away yeah I think there's two different things that that I look for that are potential red flags and and one is the job history so job security gym might have been at his company for 20 years and sometimes that's really wonderful because that means that that he found a good place that he was making a difference that um you know people were valuing him um but it can also mean that he got into a job that he thought was cushy and he just you know dug in his heels and he stayed there um so so think about that if if you're a person who's been with your company for a really really long time you're going to want to make sure that you're showing some movement what kinds of projects did you work on what kinds of new things did you learn so then at the opposite end conference Connie can sometimes be a bit of a job Hopper because she gets really excited about whatever the new tool is oh there's this new startup and they're using the the new testing platform so I want to get on to that so if I see somebody who's topping jobs every year for several years in a row that's a red flag to me because that says if I hire this person they're going to get bored and they're going to want to to move on very quickly so so to be able to um show the projects were completed to be able to speak to you know why it was that you left one job for another that would be very helpful and then the other thing that uh I look for on resumes is also skills what are what skills do these people have and so if I see job security gym is using one Antiquated tool that no other companies are using that's a red flag for me because I I think you know job security Jim hasn't bothered to learn let's say no JS and we use node.js all the time so so how do we know that job security gym is going to be able to transfer his skills to our team um but then conference Connie can sometimes tend to put every single language or tool that she's ever been exposed to even a tiny bit onto the resume so then it looks like she's sort of Jack of all trades master of none and that's concerning too because you know at my company we're going to have specific tools that we use we're going to want Connie to be able to really dive into those tools and use those and if she only has a limited knowledge of every of everything we're not so sure how well she's going to learn so so think about when when you're including tools on your resume think about what what projects um you use those tools for um and so make sure that you have that kind of experience on your resume that will help ease the uh hiring manager's mind right and the workforce the workplace has changed changed so much in the last few years right I'm putting you on the spot a little bit with this question but are there any emerging personas that you are researching or writing about until today's landscape that reflect uh the changes that have happened in the world well I think one of the personas that that I list in my book um is automation Annie and um this this isn't really new but this I think the problem is continuing to get worse um We are continuing to see software testers and I'm using that in quotes uh who really what they know how to do is write test automation test automation is great but if you don't understand your application and you don't understand what it is that you should be testing for really all you're doing is busy work you're writing code that might not provide any value at all and one of the things we do at my company when we are hiring software testers is we give them a challenge where we give them a buggy application and we say please find the bugs and give us a bug report of all the bugs that you found and it is a like astounding the number of applicants I have seen who have as much as 15 years of software testing experience who can't find the bugs so but but they on paper the resume looks wonderful because look at all the wonderful things they've automated look at the the code they know the tools they use um but if they can't find the bugs they're useless to me um so I think that's a disturbing Trend and it has continued to get worse that's interesting in some cases is it somebody that is uh uh struggling with the pressure of finding the bug in that particular situation or is it just a a skills uh issue there I think I think it could be a skills issue I don't think it's a pressure issue because it's not timed the challenge that we give them is you know take take a few days see what you can find so I don't think it's that um I think for for a lot of automation Annies I think they actually aren't interested in signing the bugs what they like is they like to write the um the code to to test the software like they find that fun they and I think maybe it's sad to say but I think there are some people who enjoy writing code but they don't want to be software developers because they don't want to be held accountable for making a feature that then people can't use but if they write test automation that is flaky and has lots of you know false failures they might not be held accountable especially if they're job hopping from place to place so I think that's what it is I think it is a lack of skill set and in some a lack of Karen wow that's an interesting Trend to keep an eye on and it really speaks to the value of uh effective exploratory testing as much as we want to focus on automation uh really gets back to that point um so Kristen if there's one blanket piece of advice that you could give to a tester who's really struggling to figure out the next step in their career what would that advice be honestly um I think don't feel like you have to boil the ocean you know that's the expression where um you just you take on too much all at once I think sometimes testers can be hard on themselves and they can feel like there's so much that I don't know um but all you need to do is find one area to work on say to yourself what is something that is a weakness that I have right now that that I could learn you know a skill set that I could improve on that would have a big impact on my career and so for some testers it may be Automation and so what they can do is um there are lots of great uh tools and programs that they can use to learn how to automate testing including I've got a whole section in my book about test Automation and how to sort of get started with test automation so set a small goal for yourself you know maybe you know this month I'm going to look at what my team has as in test Automation and I'm going to try and make a change to one test to improve it or or something like that or if your team doesn't have any test automation at all you could say I'm going to pick a test automation tool and I'm going to do a little proof of concept and run one test just small things like that another thing that's very helpful and I got this tip from a co-worker is to actually put time on your schedule for professional development so if you say to yourself every Thursday at 3 P.M I'm going to take an hour and I'm going to work on improving my skills and Mark it off as a meeting for yourself nobody has to know that it's just a meeting with yourself so they won't invite you to whatever other meeting is happening at that time and then you can say I'm busy I'm in a meeting and you can use that time to improve so start small and be consistent right and I know in your book you were really purposeful about including some different things that the reader can work through some different examples right yes um in the automation section I actually have um a GitHub repos that you can pull down and you can actually run those things on your own computer at home to see how they work I know one of the ways that I really like to learn things especially around coding is I like to see how somebody else did it and then I can transfer I can say oh well that's the syntax to do such and such so now I can just copy that and put it in my own project I've also created as part of this book to go along with the book although you don't even need to buy the book to use it there's an application a web app with an underlying API that anybody can use to test and they can test um you know making API calls and then seeing the result of those calls if they go to the web app and they can see how those two things work together they can actually use it to practice writing test automation so um that that's a use useful tool and with the with the book you can really kind of Step through how to start to acquire those skills okay Kristen final Sprint questions here in one sentence what does digital quality mean to you um to me digital quality means applications that are providing value to their users and are doing so reliably perfect what will digital experiences look like five years from now I'm expecting that five years from now that people will have a more personalized experience with all of their applications one of the things that I've noticed over the last few months is that every time I I get a new computer or get a new app on my phone I'm being given the opportunity to choose light mode or dark mode and I think that that's only going to expand that people are going to say what color would you like the app to look like or which things would you like to see on the home screen so I have a feeling that that as we move forward we're going to see more and more of that personalization I'm Team Dark mode so I hear you on that uh what is your favorite app to use in your downtime so it was hard to choose um I have three um because I like I like to always have my brain going no matter what I'm doing so if I'm running in the treadmill or if I'm doing the dishes or folding the laundry I like to have something going on in my brain so I really really enjoy um audible I enjoy listening to books while I am walking or running that just keeps me engaged and keeps me thinking about how much I'm suffering on the treadmill um and then I also really like podcasts I have an app called podcast Republic so I'll listen to podcasts while I'm doing things like folding the laundry um and then um for while I'm working I love Spotify I like to listen to music while I'm working especially if I'm doing sort of like deep testing I like to have that music kind of going on in the background so so all the all three of those I'm not sure I could live without any of those sure totally understandable and ready Tesco is available on a podcast player near you and final question for you here uh what's something that you are hopeful for I am hopeful for more software quality um so I have noticed you know over the last several years that web applications have become more consistent more consistently reliable and that is really wonderful I'm really happy about that um but every now and then something will still surprise me like I will be signing up for a new Financial Service and I'll discover that the form won't take zip codes that have a leading zero which you know basically leaves out all of the Northeast so every now and then I'll find something like that um and I feel like mobile applications are still a little bit behind I think we've we've gotten used to the fact that oh sometimes the Apple crash or oh sometimes it won't be responding so I'll have to kill it and open it up again I would love that in the future we get to the point where that's a real Rarity so I'm keeping my fingers crossed for that that was Kristin jackfone principal engineer in software testing at Paylocity her book The Complete software tester is available on Amazon and you can find the link in the podcast notes thank you for tuning in shout out to our producers Joe Stella in Samsung and graphic designer Carly Searles feel free to reach out at podcasts applause.com we'd love to hear from you and you'll hear from us in the next episode
2023-02-15