Friday, May 26, 2017

Incremental steps to continuous releases

The last eight months for me have had one theme in particular that I consistently drive forward, in small steps that sometimes feel small enough that others don't realize how things are changing.

There's an overall vision in mind for me: I want to take us through the transformation to daily releases for the windows client + management backend product I'm working with.

Where I started from

As I joined 8 months ago, the team I joined that been working for several months on a major architectural type of change - no releases but a build that could be played with internally. We had "8 epics" to drive through the architectural changes, and none of those were done. There was a lot of dependencies all around and making a release someone would use wasn't a straightforward task.

I started in September. The first release went out November 23rd.

There's more than a decade of history on making continuous releases of the detection and cleanup functionalities within the product, but the frame of the product has been released annually or quarterly for production use, and monthly or biweekly for beta - something I was introducing here a decade ago.

When I started talking of daily releases, I was told it was impossible. It took me 4 months to get rid of the "it cannot be done" comments.

The pain of regularity is necessary


I had a firm belief (which I still hold) that when things are deemed hard, you just need to do more of them to learn how to make them less hard. So I struggled with my team through the discussions of "releasing takes too much time and is away from real work", with the support from our manager setting it a team goal tied to bonuses that we would turn our 4 day release to a 4 hour release.

Each release would see a little more automation. Each release would see a little more streamlining. We would find things that would be difficult (not impossible) to change and postpone those from focusing first on the low hanging fruit, never giving up on the ultimate goal: a touch of a button releasing to various environments.

A month ago, I could happily confirm that the 1st goal as it ended up being written down was achieved.
[Team Capability] Turn 4 day release to 4 hour release
We believe that ability to make our client releases with shorter duration will result in saved time in making multiple releases. We will know we have succeeded when team does not feel need to escalate release-making as a threat to features.
We also worked on another capability:
[Team Capability] Min 2 people can make client releases
We believe that having at least two people with skills, knowledge and accesses to make client releases will result in being able to make releases while one is sick. We will know we have succeeded when release happens without 1st key person present at office within same / similar timeframe.  
What next?

We have come to a point of bi-weekly releases, which is only taking us to the level I introduced decade ago. But building on that, the next things would be to figure out ways of not breaking the builds within the 2 week intervals, and that change takes me far away from just my own team, including changing the ways test automation supports our development.

There's still work on making the four hours into four minutes of work, and I look forward to stepping through that challenge.

Our very first production environment release was just done. With more environments in play, each 4 hours can easily grow into five times this, so that would be a next step to work on too.

So the vision I'm working for:
[Team Capability] Four-minute release throughout the environments
We believe that having a push-of-a-button release will result in us focusing more on valuable features and improvement for the user and our organization. We will know we have succeeded when releases happen on a daily basis as features / changes get introduced. 
Why would I, the tester, care for this?

I have people every now and then telling me this is not testing. But this fundamentally changes the testing I do. It enables me to test each change, isolate it and see its impacts all the way through production. It supports small, human-sized discussions on changes together in the teams and gives us an ultimate definition of done - production value over task completion.

It makes developers care about the feedback I give, and enabled the feedback to be more timely. And it makes way for the necessary amount of thinking and manual work to happen in both coding and testing so that what we deliver is top-notch without exerting too much effort into it.


Pair Testing with a 15-year-old

A few months back, I had the pleasure of working with a trainee at F-Secure. As usual in schools in Finland, there was a week of practice at work with the options of taking a job your school assigns you (I did mine at age of 15 in an elderly people home) or you can find one of your own. This young fellow found one of his own through parents, and I jumped on the opportunity to pair test with him.

At first, he did not have a working computer so it was natural for us to  get started with strong style pairing:
With an idea from my head to keyboard, it must go through someone else's hands. 
He was my hands, as I was testing firewall. And in many ways he was a natural in this style of work. He would let me decide where to go and what to do, but speak back to me about his observations and ideas, extending what I could see and do all by myself. Most of the things we did together were things I would have done by myself. Only difference was the times of going to the whiteboard to model what we knew and had learned, where I guided him to navigate me in the ideas to document very much in the same strong style pairing. As the driver drawing, I would ask questions based on our shared testing experience when he would seem to miss a concept.

His ability to test grew fast. He learned to use the application. He learned to extend his exploration with test automation that existed and play with it to create the type of data we wanted.

My reward was to see him enjoy the work I love so much. His words on the end of our joint experience without me prompting still make me smile: "I now understand what testing is and would love to do more of it".

He joins us for a full month in June. I can't wait to pair up with him again.

Wednesday, May 24, 2017

Impact of Test Automation in my Everyday Worklife

I'm not particularly convinced of the testing our teams test automation does for us. The scenarios is automation are somewhat simple, yet take extensive time to run. They are *system tests* and I would very much prefer seeing more things around components the team is responsible for. System tests fail often for dependencies outside the team control.

I've been actively postponing the time of doing really something about it, and today I stopped to think about what existence of the minimal automation has meant for me.

The better test automation around here seem to find random crashes (with logs and dumps that enable fixing), but that is really not the case with what I'm seeing close.

The impact existence of test automation has had for my everyday work life is that I can see with a glimpse if the test systems are down so that I don't need to pay attention to installing regularly just to know it still installs.

So I stopped to think: has this really changed something for me, personally. It has. I feel a little less rushed with my routines. And I can appreciate that.

Tuesday, May 9, 2017

Bias for action


'Bias for Action'. That's a phrase I picked up ages ago, yet one that has been keenly on my mind for some time now.

It means (to me) that if I can choose planning and speculating vs. doing something, I should rather be doing something. It's in the work we do that we discover the work that needs doing.

There are things I feel need doing, and I notice myself trying to convince others in doing those over being alone in doing those. I notice being afraid of going in and starting the restructure of our test automation to a shape that would make more sense.

Without bias for action, I procrastinate. I plan. I try to figure out a way of communicating. I don't get anything done.

With bias for action, I make mistakes and learn. I make myself more vulnerable and work with my fears of inadequacy.

It's been such an important thing to remember: things don't change without changing them. And I can be a person to change things I feel strongly for.