For the last 10 months, I've worked on a project that assigned me end to end testing responsibility. As I joined the project, I had little clue on what the work would end up being. I trusted that like all other work, things will sort out actively learning about it.
Armed with the idea of job crafting ('make the job you have the job you want') I knew what I wanted:
- principal engineer position with space for hands-on work
- making an impact, being responsible
- working with people, not alone
With a uniquely open mandate, I figured out my role would be a mix of three things:
- tester within a team
- test manager within a project delivering a system
- test coach within the organization
The learnings have been fascinating.
My past experience of growing teams into being responsible for the system rather than their own components was helpful, and resulted in seeing both confusion and importance of confusion of one team member choosing scope of work bigger than the team.
I had collected more answers to why than many people with longer history in the company, focusing on connections. The connections enabled me to prioritize the testing I did, and ask others for testing I wasn't going to do myself.
The way I chose to do end to end testing differed from what my predecessor had chosen it to be for them, as I executed a vision of getting end-to-end tested, but in small pieces.
I focused on enabling continuous delivery where I could, taking pride in the work where my team was able to release their part of the system 26 times in 2020.
I focused on enabling layering of testing, having someone else test things that were already tested. It proved valuable often, and enabled an approach to testing where we are stronger together. The layered approach allowed me to experience true smoke testing (finding hardware problems in incremental system testing).
The layered approach also helped me understand where my presence was needed most for the success of the project, and move my tester presence from one team in the project to another half-way through. I believe this mobility made a difference in scale as I could help critical parts from within.
I came to appreciate conversations as part of figuring out who would test things. I saw amazing exploratory testing emerge done by developers following hunches of critical areas of risks from those conversations.
Instead of taking my end to end testing responsibility as a call to test, I took it as a call to facilitate. While I have used every single interface the system includes (and that is many!), every interface has someone who knows it deeper and has local executable documentation - test automation - that captures their concerns as well as many of mine.
Looking back, it has been an effort to do end to end testing as a test strategist. You can't strategize about testing without testing. My whole approach to finding the layers is founded on the idea that I test alongside the others. Not just the whole team, but all of the teams, and in a system of size, that is some ground to cover.
