Dear customer,
I am delighted to note you have come to realize you could use some testing services. I am delighted, because I deeply care about how those services could help customers work out their quality, productivity and decision-making areas with timely empirical information. And I am even more delighted I get to be in the position to receive such requests. No sarcasm. I look forward to any level of collaboration we may have, be it the RFP you just submitted or the potential engagement that could follow.
That said, I need to bring to your attention that I am puzzled with many things you are asking for.
As someone who studied at Helsinki University of Technology for 251.25 cr (just checked) but never graduated, I have a bit of a pet peeve on the idea that my 27 years in testing don't qualify me to work on your projects. I can justify your request for Bachelor or Master of Science degree by balancing it with the fact that that your other requirements often speak of someone with little years on the job, and delight myself in how that is a smart move on the requests. Balance of cheap - some experience - completed studies bodes good. I would wish you would allow for expensive sold cheap - lots of experience - knowledge you seek of the studies without completion. But that is kind of a personal request.
That is not why I am writing this public letter to so many of you though. That is just a backdrop. The real reason for is that you ask other things, and I don't think you realize how ambiguous those requests you make are. I am sampling some from the 5 months of samples I now have had access to.
Requesting Acceptance Testing experience
When in 2001 I summarized my literature research on Testing in Extreme Programming (XP), the complete lack of tester in the method was a key takeaway. Acceptance testing was used as a way of describing a particular style of functional tests in the team. The world of testing knew these as system tests, yet the term Acceptance tests took a significant foothold.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world thought of Acceptance testing as anything that the customer organization would do for purposes of acceptance. It could be anything from accepting based on a report of other testing, to very detailed and organized test effort ensuring the system adheres to explicit and implicit requirements in the scale that was asked for (and paid for) as well as fits the purpose of use it was commissioned for. Key takeaway is that it is something the customer organization does.
When you ask for experience of Acceptance testing, you could mean modern end to end automation on GUI and API, driven by examples. You could also ask if we have people who worked on customer organization payroll. You could ask if they have been specifically commissioned to represent a customer organization in an acceptance testing project.
You probably had an idea of why you asked for this experience. You would do better if you could explain that.
Requesting Integration Testing experience
If there ever was an ambiguous term, integration testing is guaranteed to be the one. Ask 10 people, you get 10 different answers.
It used to be popular to call rehearsal rounds to system testing integration testing. The only real separation between these two were that contractors would get to keep bugs they found a secret from integration testing, but had to share them with the customer while in system testing. I am almost certain you weren't looking for people who have played this game. It was really popular 15-20 years ago.
Those tired of the games started calling it integration testing if we tested a feature while other features were still unimplemented. Usually the focus was on integrating that feature to other pre-existing features.
Some books recommended integration testing is when we have components or subsystems, and we specifically focus on the back and forth communication between those parts. People rarely knew how to do this in practice though.
Other books emphasized that integration testing is about integration strategies, focusing on smaller scales in large and complex systems, advising to choose an incremental strategy over a big-bang strategy. There integration testing meant control of test environments.
Many people though went with a very straightforward idea. They called it integration testing if you could test through an API. However, most people would call that API testing rather than integration testing.
You probably had an idea of why you asked for this experience. You would do better if you could explain that.
Requesting Test Automation experience
You asking for test automation is different kind of ambiguous. It is hard to find people who don't have experience of test automation in their teams, but only some write it themselves. You may not realize, but people who have test automation experience but don't write it themselves but through exceptional collaboration with developers may do better in long term automation efforts you could be seeking.
My personal pet peeve is that a lot of people who know how to automate don't know how to test. So they have experience in test automation but that may not be the test automation you want.
You probably have more specific needs than the high level category. Maybe you have existing tests that need maintaining? Maybe you are about to get started? Maybe you need build pipelines rather than the tests?
You probably had an idea of why you asked for this experience. You would do better if you could explain that.
Requesting UI Testing experience
By now, you already know what I am about to say. Experience of WebUIs is different to experience on WindowsUIs, or the intricate details of Java UIs intended to be cross-platform. You may mean usability testing. You may mean specific technology. You may mean awareness of isolating UIs from the backend so that you can do great UI component testing enabling UI changes of the future.
You probably had an idea of why you asked for this experience. You would do better if you could explain that.
I want to help you. I want to find you the right people, exceptional people. I want those people to enjoy working in your projects, doing good work, and getting praise. And it would be a lot better for us all if we ended up aiming for the same thing.
The ways you ask in public sector bids aren't helping you. We've learned how to work with those, and change is so much work that we just do what you ask. Unless you ask that we figure out better together. I am sure I am not the only contractor representative would be happy to volunteer to work with you for better. Perhaps we could do this as a joint community effort, customers and contractors roundtable style?