September | 2014 | Flow of Testing

Photo credit: wolfgangfoto (Creative Commons)

I watched a while ago a great video from Michael Skok. There he mentioned interesting thing about new products. That’s Gain & Pain. Which were defined as:

Gain – The gain delivered to customer

Pain – The pain and cost for the customer to adopt

I thought about this from the perspective of testing and it felt like a good heuristic to consider while testing.

Think about the pain of adopting a product or feature.

It can be re-planning business process, providing training and training material related to new product, more work for people who are handling orders (because new product has helped in increasing the amount of orders), more work for people who are at help desk (to support people who are struggling with the new product), recruiting more people, investing on software licenses, users realizing that they’re not the subject-matter experts anymore for the new product, migrating existing production data into the new product…

And so on.

There’s probably often (if not always) pain when new products (or features) are being adopted. Try to think whose lives the product (or feature) will touch. Not just the end customers, but also the people (e.g. admins) who work behind the curtains.

My friend asked me last week if I could share him any software development or testing related podcasts that he could listen while cycling. I said that I would reply to him when I find a good moment. I realized though that I should probably share those via blog post so others might benefit from it also. That’s the reason I’m writing this post now.

There’s just one catch. I haven’t listened that much podcasts. At least lately. On the other hand, I’ve listened a lot conference talks from Youtube & Vimeo, which might be useful also. Let’s see what I can come up with.

Podcasts

This Week in Software Testing

One of the first testing related podcasts that I found couple years ago, was This Week in Software Testing by Matthew Heusser & Michael Larsen. It would appear that some of the episodes can be downloaded without Software Test Pro registration, but at least my personal favorite (episode #4 with Jerry Weinberg) required registration. I know that people don’t like registrations, but I do think that Jerry’s episode alone is worth it on this case. There’s a small snippet of that episode on my past blog post.

AB Testing

Alan Page and Brent Jensen have had podcast episodes so far and I’ve listened few of them. Those have been interesting – especially if you want to have a peek inside Microsoft.

Testcast

This is a podcast that’s hosted by Trish Khoo and Bruce McLeod. I’ve known about this podcast for a long time, but haven’t yet started listening it.

Testing Podcast

I’ve only heard one podcast related to this – and it was one with Richard Bradshaw about Automation in Testing

Testing in the Pub

Based on the recommendation of Stephen Janaway, I added this here. Considering that it’s hosted by Stephen & Dan Ashby, I would expect it to be worth listening.

Testing Bias

Andy Tinkham mentioned me this podcast which he and Ian Bannerman are hosting. Check it out!

How To Think About Science

I’m not actually sure if this is a podcast or what, but nevertheless interesting series of episodes about science. I originally found this because of the recommendation by Michael Bolton.

Hanselminutes

This seemed like a good software development podcast based on one episode (#65 Scott Hanselman with Martin Fowler & David Heinemeier Hanson) I recently listened.

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These are the ones that I’ve had some experience with. There’s probably a lot more podcasts out there, especially if we expand the scope to software development in general.

Audio

Audio of several Let’s Test (2013) sessions

Me and my colleague recorded the audio of several sessions when we were at Let’s Test last year. Those can be found from my Dropbox shared folder. There’s also a blog post about that and it explains the background a bit more.

Audio of 4 Turku Agile Day (2014) sessions

I was giving a speak on Turku Agile Day this year and also recorded several sessions. After I had asked permission for sharing those, I put them on my Dropbox shared folder.

Videos

Besides audio & podcasts, I’ve personally focused more on Youtube and Vimeo videos from various conferences. I listen those while driving to work and back home. Below are many of the talks that I’ve enjoyed the most. I’ve listened all of them and can recommend those for that reason. I categorized them by the speaker as that’s probably the easiest way for me to do the categorization.

J. B. Rainsberger

Practical Tools for Playing Well with Others

7 minutes, 26 seconds

Extreme Personal Finance

Integrated Tests Are A Scam

The Economics of Software Design

Dave Snowden

Managing under conditions of uncertainty

How not to manage complexity

Tacit Knowledge

James Bach

Open Lecture by James Bach on Software Testing