With the negative (and founded) feelings I have towards the ISTQB testing certifications, I've been recently trying very hard to focus on real alternatives, not just being against.
This post is again inspired by a tweet:
When I teach exploratory testing, I often talk about experiences I had with driving school as analogy. It's been ages since I did my own and I still remember the nervousness that blocked me from focusing on all the aspects and how they were delivered, but I've had the fortune of following my younger siblings go through the process.
Not many years ago, my sister came back from her first driving lesson in driving school. She told the lesson started on an almost empty parking lot, where she was shown the basics: pedals, gears, steering wheel, mirrors and such, one at a time. She was driving around the parking lot, and all of a sudden the teacher tells to drive out, to the open road and towards the driving school just couple of blocks away. With a lot of focus into actions she is not used to putting together, the end result is her stating to our brother: "can you show me the basics again now that I'm not in panic mode, so that I can actually focus on the actions".
When I teach testing - the actual hands on testing - there's a lot of similarities. There's different actions that you - the tester - need to be able to balance in a way that fits your rhythm of learning. If you need to take a moment to actually read a log and not just rely on an automated tool to make sense of what you're experiencing, it's your right to do so. If you feel that taking notes while you test is difficult, you can structure your work so that you don't try to intertwine things quite so much, but take the time for the notes on regular intervals, focusing on just that. If coming up with test ideas while you test does not come naturally to you, nothing prevents you from taking a session just focused on brainstorming. You're in the driver's seat, in control.
When you start as a new tester and take a course, it's not the vocabulary that you need to make sense of to be useful. It's understanding what kinds of actions need to happen, and how you best fit those into your personality, skills and interests.
If testing on the courses was taught more like a driver's licence, we would be taught the basic actions we need to take from configuring the product to coming up with ideas of what to test, creating useful documentation for personal and team use and recognizing problems when they are right in front of us (and many more). We would be taught to focus on the actions first, and then allowed and encouraged to practice putting the actions together into series of actions.
Many times when I drive a car, I leave home and get where I was going, without a clue of what really happened on the route. After years of practice, the actions have morphed into something I don't pay attention to. But if anything happens on route, I'm surely reacting to it. It's hard to see the things that I had trouble with at early stages: changing gears and turning the wheel simultaneously. The act of testing is very much like that. We control the pace to make the flow perfect - for each tester.
Licence to drive allows you to practice with others. Licence to test that would be worthwhile does not yet exist. But if you look for courses that justify your usefulness as a tester, ISTQB Foundation is the idea furthest from useful. I should know, my name is on the creators of the syllabus and I'm sorry for being part of creating such a monster.
I think BBST (Black Box Software Testing) series - in particular the one Cem Kaner continues developing under Kaner Fiedler Associates Inc - is a real alternative. So is Rapid Software Testing by James Bach and Michael Bolton, and numerous independent trainer's (including myself) contents do a great job at delivering relevant contents. On trainings, more variety is usually better. Some messages sink in after repeating differently. And we just don't need to agree on a one true way to test, as there's so many different places and cases to do testing in. Context matters. Useful results matter.
This post is again inspired by a tweet:
@teemuvesala Certificate is like driver's license. It doesn't mean you are competent but it means you can be held accountable for your work.
— Esko Hannula (@eskohannula) August 20, 2014
Somehow, I hope certificate would be like a driver's licence. I also hope that courses leading up to certification (if such are even necessary for testing) would be taught more like driver's courses.When I teach exploratory testing, I often talk about experiences I had with driving school as analogy. It's been ages since I did my own and I still remember the nervousness that blocked me from focusing on all the aspects and how they were delivered, but I've had the fortune of following my younger siblings go through the process.
Not many years ago, my sister came back from her first driving lesson in driving school. She told the lesson started on an almost empty parking lot, where she was shown the basics: pedals, gears, steering wheel, mirrors and such, one at a time. She was driving around the parking lot, and all of a sudden the teacher tells to drive out, to the open road and towards the driving school just couple of blocks away. With a lot of focus into actions she is not used to putting together, the end result is her stating to our brother: "can you show me the basics again now that I'm not in panic mode, so that I can actually focus on the actions".
When I teach testing - the actual hands on testing - there's a lot of similarities. There's different actions that you - the tester - need to be able to balance in a way that fits your rhythm of learning. If you need to take a moment to actually read a log and not just rely on an automated tool to make sense of what you're experiencing, it's your right to do so. If you feel that taking notes while you test is difficult, you can structure your work so that you don't try to intertwine things quite so much, but take the time for the notes on regular intervals, focusing on just that. If coming up with test ideas while you test does not come naturally to you, nothing prevents you from taking a session just focused on brainstorming. You're in the driver's seat, in control.
When you start as a new tester and take a course, it's not the vocabulary that you need to make sense of to be useful. It's understanding what kinds of actions need to happen, and how you best fit those into your personality, skills and interests.
If testing on the courses was taught more like a driver's licence, we would be taught the basic actions we need to take from configuring the product to coming up with ideas of what to test, creating useful documentation for personal and team use and recognizing problems when they are right in front of us (and many more). We would be taught to focus on the actions first, and then allowed and encouraged to practice putting the actions together into series of actions.
Many times when I drive a car, I leave home and get where I was going, without a clue of what really happened on the route. After years of practice, the actions have morphed into something I don't pay attention to. But if anything happens on route, I'm surely reacting to it. It's hard to see the things that I had trouble with at early stages: changing gears and turning the wheel simultaneously. The act of testing is very much like that. We control the pace to make the flow perfect - for each tester.
Licence to drive allows you to practice with others. Licence to test that would be worthwhile does not yet exist. But if you look for courses that justify your usefulness as a tester, ISTQB Foundation is the idea furthest from useful. I should know, my name is on the creators of the syllabus and I'm sorry for being part of creating such a monster.
I think BBST (Black Box Software Testing) series - in particular the one Cem Kaner continues developing under Kaner Fiedler Associates Inc - is a real alternative. So is Rapid Software Testing by James Bach and Michael Bolton, and numerous independent trainer's (including myself) contents do a great job at delivering relevant contents. On trainings, more variety is usually better. Some messages sink in after repeating differently. And we just don't need to agree on a one true way to test, as there's so many different places and cases to do testing in. Context matters. Useful results matter.
