SmartQA Community

#59

SmartQA Digest

Smartness is a brilliant combination of knowledge and skill. Skill is acquired by intense practice. Intense practice happens when you have good habits. In this article I look at SEVEN habits that are key to SmartQA. These are SEE | ASK | SHOW | CHEW| SPIT| FEEL | DO. An easy to read visual article “7 Habits to Smart QA“.
 
“Tools, methods & processes are 4th/5th order extensions. People get it totally wrong, ignore the holistic part of mindset & culture, jump onto tools & methods bandwagon, because that’s the easiest thing to sell.” says Tathagat Varma in this week’s smartbits video What is Agile?.
 

Hope you like the poster “Good habits are the foundation for high performance“.

beEnriched

7 Habits to SmartQA

Smartness is a brilliant combination of knowledge and skill is using this.
Skill is acquired by intense practice. Intense practice happens when it becomes a habit. In this article I look at SEVEN habits that are key to SmartQA.

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expandMind

The power of checklist

Recently I read the book “The Checklist Manifesto” by Atul Gawande.  “An essential primer on complexity in medicine” is what New York Times states about

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#58 – “Build in quality”

SmartQA Digest

What does it take to Build In Quality? –  A set of brilliant ideas curated from four articles, a gist of which is highlighted here.
 

Building Quality In – “When looking at quality from a testing perspective, I would agree that it is not possible to build software quality in. To build quality in you need to look at the bigger picture. There are many ways to improve quality. It all depends on the problem. Maybe, you can automate something that previously had to be done by a human being. Maybe, you need training to better use the tools you have. Maybe you need to find a better tool to do the job. Or maybe, you need a checklist to remind you of what you need to look at. The possibilities are endless.

Reactive vs Proactive Quality Management – “To understand how to build quality into our products from the very beginning, we need to understand why this is not happening naturally. The most common way of preventing defects from reaching customers comes down to introducing a great number of inspections and countless KPI or metrics into the process. The problem with this approach is that it is reactive. And wasteful.

Shifting into proactive quality management – Lean management views the issue of quality and defects via the lens of value and continuous improvement

Scalable Definition of Done – “Definition of done is an important way of ensuring increment of value can be considered complete. The continuous development of incremental system functionality requires a scaled definition of done to ensure the right work is done at the right time, some early and some only for release.In an era where we are obsessed with productivity, it is not about doing more, of being busy that is deemed as high productivity. In fact it is the converse, of being smart, of doing less and accomplishing more.  Software tools help in increasing productivity by allowing us to do faster, better and cheaper.

 
Read the full article What does it take to Build In Quality? Complementing this is a lovely 4-minute smartbits video from Girish Elchuri  on “Build in Quality“.

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#57

SmartQA Digest

In an era where we are obsessed with productivity, it is not about doing more, of being busy that is deemed as high productivity. In fact it is the converse, of being smart, of doing less and accomplishing more.  Software tools help in increasing productivity by allowing us to do faster, better and cheaper. 

But the most powerful tool “the human intellect” can help us do lesser, coupled with tools of speed, productivity scales geometrically.In these times of AI, it is necessary to exploit HI (Human Intelligence) to do stuff beyond the intelligent machines and deliver higher value. The article “39 tips to being productive” in allot this,

In this week’s smartbits Zulfikar says as why understand deployment architecture is important to testing the whole system in the video “System deployment architecture and testing“.

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expandMind

Featured image for article "Sketchnote"

Sketchnote

Sketchnotes are purposeful doodling while listening to something interesting. Sketchnotes don’t require high drawing skills, but do require a skill to visually synthesize and summarize via shapes, connectors, and text. Sketchnotes are as much a method of note taking as they are a form of creative expression.

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#56 – COVID19 & Clean Code Part 2

SmartQA Digest

As the world chugs along containing the pandemic, I was inspired to draw parallels from how the world is handling this to large scale software development. The article “COVID19 and Clean Code Part 2 : Process & Criteria” focuses on process flow and criteria to delivering clean code for large scale systems.
 
In this week’s smartbits Yuvaraj Thanikachalam crisps outlines  “What is Blockchain?“, check it out.

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Necessary but not sufficient book

Necessary but not Sufficient

I have been a great fan of Dr Goldratt having read all this books, my favourite being his first book “The Goal”. This book “Necessary but not Sufficient” is written as a “business novel” and shows the fictional application of the Theory of Constraints to Enterprise resource planning (ERP) and operations software and organizations using that software.

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#55 – COVID19 & Clean code

SmartQA Digest

Corona virus aka COVID19 is a global talking point now. What is being done to contain the COVID19? THREE actions in terms of Prevention, Detection, Containment being aggressively pursued keeping in mind that the three targets of young children, old people and sick persons are the most vulnerable as of now. In this week’s article “What can we learn from COVID19 to write clean clean code” we take a look at the actions being taken to contain the pandemic and relate to what to do deliver clean code.
 
This week’s SmartBites video is a lovely video on “Delivering Clean Code #1” from Raja Nagendra Kumar. This week’s smartbits is on “How to reduce waste(bugs)” by Tathagat Varma. 
 
“Building new hospitals/ shelters alone is not adequate, it needs to be complemented by community strategies, such as limiting group activities, and personal hygiene practices” says Winnie Yip, Harvard University. In the same vein, testing alone is not enough, clean code practices need to be installed for SmartQA is what this week’s poster says!

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Black box thinking

Learning from failures .The inside story of how success really happens and how we cannot grow unless we learn from our mistakes.

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54

SmartQA Digest

SmartQA is a beautiful combination of thinking styles, a mindset of brilliance and minimalism,  tech prowess, heightened clarity,  great design and meaningful pauses, outlined as ten suggestions in this week’s beEnriched article TEN suggestions for SmartQA.
 
Tools & technology certainly bring in a lot of efficiencies and improves user experience, but I believe human intellect is required for SmartQA says Shivaji Raju. Intellect is needed to validate coverage, to ensure we have good distribution of test cases across different layers(UI, API) and finally to do exploratory testing he says in this week’s smartbits video “Role of Human Intellect in QA“.

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53

SmartQA Digest

Continuing from last week’s article “Efficiency -> Productivity -> Creativity“, this week is about “8 things I do to solve problems creatively” . Over the years, there are a few things I do consistently, to solve problems technical or business. The process is magical, to see the larva of an idea become a beautiful butterfly, the solution. Oh, this is a quick read poster-type article with crisp text.
 
In this week’s smartbits Zulfikar outlines the Management expectations of CIO and the IT team. Be it a large or  small organisation with end user base big or small, the challenges are very similar, he says. They expect new solutions and newer tech to be adopted as they make their way into the market.
 
A quick preview to Immersive Session Testing is here . A tool that assists in testing immersively will become available shortly. Please reply to this email ID if you are keen on participating in the user trials.

beEnriched

expandMind

The power of checklist

Recently I read the book “The Checklist Manifesto” by Atul Gawande.  “An essential primer on complexity in medicine” is what New York Times states about

Read More »
smart ways for software testing

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#52

SmartQA Digest

Efficiency is a given now, high productivity aided by intelligent systems will become a norm, so what is our role? In this age of automated & continuous testing, efficiency gains are given and productivity is on the increase. In this era of AI systems, it is time we shift from productivity to creativity. 
 
Aytekin Tank says Ford reduced the manufacturing time of car from 12 hours to 2.5 hours by improving efficiency, breaking the company’s Model T automobile assembly into 84 distinct steps, with a worker specialising in a task and using power-driven machinery to do the work. Then the focus shifted to productivity, not efficiency. In the age of AI and machine learning, just being more productive won’t cut it.  Creativity is the new productivity  says Scott Belsky.
Read more in this week’s beEnriched article Efficiency -> Productivity -> Creativity.
 
In this smartbits video “DFT& Automation” Girish Elchuri outlines how design for testability aids in test automation. There are three aspects to be looked at when we talk about test automation, he says. The first one is running the test cases, the second, invoking the functionality that needs to be tested and the third, asserting the outcome tests as success or failure. We can talk about test automation only if we can automate all these three functions.

beEnriched

Efficiency -> Productivity -> Creativity

Efficiency is a given now , high productivity aided by intelligent systems will become a norm, so what is our role? In this age of automated & continuous testing, efficiency gains are given and productivity is on the increase. In this era of AI systems, it is time we shift from productivity to creativity.

Read More »

expandMind

SmartQA Poster

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#51

SmartQA Digest

“Productivity doesn’t mean doing the most, but getting the most from what you have done”. In an era where we are obsessed with productivity, it is not about doing more, of being busy, that is deemed as high productivity. In fact it is the converse, of being smart, of doing less and accomplishing more. Here are interesting  tips to being productive in “39 tips to being productive – Do SmartQA“.
 
In this week’s SmartBites,Yuvaraj Thanikachalam outlines QA aspects to testing Blockchain applications. Decomposing a Blockchain stack into five layers, he outlines various aspects to validate in each layer. He goes on to outline the nuances like testing for decentralisation, asset status, value management (security, pen test) and democratisation (data not misused).
 
For end-users a solution should make their job easier, more productive and efficient. For business owners a new/improved system should deliver business value, be in enhanced experience, cost reduction or improving productivity. This is what is outlined by Zulfikar Deen in “Expectations of owners and users” in the smartbits video.

beEnriched

expandMind

Black box thinking

Learning from failures .The inside story of how success really happens and how we cannot grow unless we learn from our mistakes.

Read More »
Posters high performance QA

SmartBites

||VIEWS FROM INDUSTRY LEADERS||

smartbits

||NUGGETS OF LEARNING||

#50

SmartQA Digest

Welcome to the GOLDEN ISSUE! I am delighted that we are in the 50th week. Thank you for your readership. This is a special issue as we get close to a soft launch of our tool “doSmartQA” that is an enabler to performing Immersive Session Testing.
 
What is “Immersive Session Testing”? Well it is a style of testing that exploits logical left with creative right, enabling one to immerse deeply and test rapidly in short sessions, outlined in this week’s SmartBites “Immersive Session Testing – A Rapid Intro”.
 
With machines becoming more intelligent and enabled by AI, it is time we focus on creativity to think differently and exploit machines for its intelligence. A focus in shifting to using right brain more, will certainly help in the goal to “Shift Left” – that of prevention or doing less, the focus of this week’s beEnriched article “Shift Right to Shift Left – Being creative“.

beEnriched

expandMind

Featured image for article "Sketchnote"

Sketchnote

Sketchnotes are purposeful doodling while listening to something interesting. Sketchnotes don’t require high drawing skills, but do require a skill to visually synthesize and summarize via shapes, connectors, and text. Sketchnotes are as much a method of note taking as they are a form of creative expression.

Read More »

SmartBites

||VIEWS FROM INDUSTRY LEADERS||

smartbits

||NUGGETS OF LEARNING||