September 13, 2013

SFDIPOT: end of week Review

Well it's been a week of concentrating on using SFDIPOT in my testing activities.  So did it make me a superstar tester? Did it show me every bug? Was my team amazed at the testing plans I wrote? Could it cure cancer and bring about world peace?  These are all (well mostly) important questions that I have to answer when I ask myself the most important questions: Will I keep using it? Will I encourage others to use it?

 Did it make me a superstar tester? No, but it did have some excellent benefits. It reduced my testing time be giving me better direction when I setup my testing plans.  It gave me better insight into bug investigations. It gave me new ideas of areas to test to add to my list already too long list of areas to investigate. I wasn't really looking for a single item to change and I'd become a superstar, I was looking to improve, and learn. That part of my mission was a success.

Did it show me every bug? No, but I was able to find some sooner than I would have otherwise. I don't think there is any tool or technique out there that will find every bug, the search space to find every bug is impossibly large. So a better metric might be did it help me find more bugs, or find the bugs faster? In my experience from this past week, yes it did.

Was my team amazed with my new testing plans? Not really, for me, it didn't change much. I can see it creating better  testing plans for some, but in my environment, working in a agile development team, I don't often share my testing plans.  My testing plans are usually something I write for myself so that I don't forget anything. Being a single tester on a team has lead to some bad habits, but I'll deal with those another week.

In all it's been a good week. I enjoyed this emphasis on SFDIPOT, and the extra thought it helped me do in my testing activities.  I didn't really use it as much as I meant to, I'll keep using and teaching it to the team of testers where I work, and I'll keep you updated if I learn anything new about it in that journey.

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