Joey McAllister emailed me for Techwell, and we talked about testing mobile applications. You can read both parts of the interview here:  Part 1 and Part 2. We talked about testing apps on the move, some of the features of devices, and other mobile testing topics.

Elisabeth has been in business for herself as an independent consultant for 15 years. She has a great blog post about it here: Happy Birthday Quality Tree Software. In the post, she describes the workload and the challenges. I’ve been an independent for about half as long as she has, about 7.5 years, and my experiences mirror what she describes. I too get queries from aspiring consultants who ask for advice. Elisabeth talks about long hours, hard work, and challenges. This quote in particular resonated with me: “The bottom line is that running a business, any business, is hard.”

If you are curious about going out on your own, this is a good piece to read. As a business owner, you are constantly looking at ways to be profitable, and dealing with challenges and changes in your environment. What do you do when you work very hard at a new revenue stream and it doesn’t work? What happens when a popular source of revenue loses favor in the market and you have to start over with something new? What do you do when people copy you, and your business model and a reliable source of revenue slows to a trickle because of market saturation? It is a balance of looking at your cashflow, looking at your financials and adjusting, taking risks, failing, succeeding, and adjusting some more. Also, a lot of what you do as a business owner is tedious – the logistics of running a business can be a big time sink, so you have to balance activities constantly to keep up with market forces. Elisabeth is correct, when you get it right, it is incredibly rewarding, but be prepared to put in time and effort, and to be able to motivate yourself through the boring parts, the low parts and the really hard parts. And sometimes, you have to reset your business and start over again.

Working with Electromind, I’m offering a 2 day public course on Testing Mobile Applications in London, UK, May 10-11, 2012.

Register here: Testing Mobile Apps Registration

Testing Mobile Applications Workshop Description

2 day tutorial by Jonathan Kohl.

Note: Participants must bring their own mobile device for course exercises. This is a hands-on course.

As part of the Agile Vancouver Quality in Agile conference, I’m offering a 1 day public workshop on Testing Mobile Applications in Vancouver, BC, Canada, May 25, 2012.

I will also be speaking about testing and value during the conference on May 26.

Register here: Quality in Agile Conference Registration

Testing Mobile Applications Workshop Description

1 day tutorial by Jonathan Kohl.

Note: Participants must bring their own mobile device for course exercises. This is a hands-on course.

Welcome to the new kohl.ca website. The new design is mobile-friendly and has more features and information. We’re still working out some kinks and improving content; my original blog dates back to 2003, so we’ve had our work cut out for us on the update. If something is missing or broken, please contact us.

If you are reading this post via RSS, your reader is pointed at the new feed, and you are subscribed to any new posts. If you don’t see this in your feed reader, update or add: http://www.kohl.ca/feed  to your RSS reader to subscribe to my blog.

Here is the slide deck: Secrets of Faking a Test Project. This is satire, but it is intended to get your attention and help you think about whether you are creating value on your projects, or merely faking it by following convention.

The Back Story

Back in 2007 I got a request to fill in for James Bach at a conference. He had an emergency to attend to and the organizers wondered if I could take his place. One of the requests was that I present James’ “Guide to Faking a Test Project” presentation because it was thought-provoking and entertaining. They sent me the slide deck and I found myself chuckling, but also feeling a bit sad about how common many of the practices are.

I couldn’t just use James’ slides because he has an inimitable style, and I had plenty of my own ideas and experiences to draw on that I wanted to share, so I used James’ slide deck as a guide and created and presented my own version.

This presentation is satirical – we challenge people to think about how they would approach a project where the goal is to release bad software, but you make it look as if you really tried to test it well. It didn’t take much effort on our part, we just looked to typical, all too common practices that are often the staple of how people approach testing projects, and presented them from a different angle.

I decided to release these slides publicly today, because almost 5 years after I first gave that presentation, this type of thing still goes on. Testers are forced into a wasteful, strict process of testing that rarely creates value. One of my colleages contacted me – she is on her first software testing project. She kept asking me about different practices that to her seemed completely counter-productive to effective testing, and asked if it was normal. Much of what she has described about her experiences are straight out of that slide deck. In this case, I think it is a naive approach. No doubt managers are much more worried about meeting impossible deadlines than finding problems that might take more time than is allocated, rather than blatant charlatans who are deliberately faking it, but sadly, the outcome is the same.

If you haven’t thought about how accepted testing approaches and “best practices” can be viewed from another perspective, I hope this is an eye opener for you. While you might not think it is particularly harmful to a project to merely follow convention, you might be faking testing to the most important stakeholder: you.

I’ve been resisting it, but I’ve been asked by enough of you to finally join in. Follow me: @jonathan_kohl

I recently received my copy of Experiences of Test Automation: Case Studies of Software Test Automation. I contributed chapter 19: There’s More to Automation than Regression Testing: Thinking Outside the Box. I’m recommending this book not only because I am a contributor, but I have enjoyed the raw honesty about test automation by experienced practitioners. Finally, we have a book that provides balanced, realistic, experienced-based content.

For years, it seems that test automation writing is dominated by cheerleading, tool flogging, hype and hyperbole. (There are some exceptions, but I still run into exaggerations and how automation is an unquestioning good far too often.) The division between the promoters of the practice (ie. those who make a lot of money from it), the decision makers they convince and the technical practitioners is often deep. It can be galling to constantly see outright claptrap about how automation is a cure to all ills, or views that only talk about benefits without also pointing out drawbacks and limitations. It’s really difficult to implement something worthwhile in a world of hype and misinformation that skews implementation ideas and the expected results. This book is refreshingly different.

I agreed to contribute after talking to Dot Graham – she wanted content that was relevant, real, and honest. She said their goal for the book was a balanced view from real practitioners on the ground who would talk about good points, but we also needed to be honest about bad points and challenges we had to overcome. Dot liked my Man and Machine work and asked me to expand on that concept.

Now that I have a copy of the book, I find myself smiling at the honesty and reality described within. Did I really just read that? Where else will you find an admission of: “We tried tool____, and it was a complete disaster?“

If you’re serious about automation, consider buying this book. It is chock full of real-world experience, and you are bound to find at least one lesson that you can apply directly to your automation effort. That is worth the cost alone, especially when we are constantly bombarded with distorted ideals and hype. You won’t agree with everything, and we all have preferences and biases, but the real-world honesty is a constant theme, and a breath of fresh air.

Heather Shanholtzer of SQE interviewed me for TechWell a few days ago. You can read the interview here: The Future Is Mobile Technology.

I’ll be speaking on mobile application testing in October in Calgary, and in November in Toronto.