SmartQA Community

#42

SmartQA Digest

I had an interesting discussion with an engineering director of a product company on the subject – “dedicated QA or non-dedicated QA”. He was keen on a strong development QA as part of engineering team with an additional dedicated(small) QA  team, and was seeking opinions. That triggered the thought for this interesting article “Role of dedicated QA in the new age dev” in the beEnriched section.
 
Simplification is hard, and can drive innovation. Listen to the 3-minute video “Simplify, Innovation happens” from Raja Nagendra Kumar in this week’s smartbits.
 
Have you watched the video on inclusive design titled “Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design” that was published last week?
 
Did you check out the new SmartQA site smartqa.community  All the prior digests are also available now here !

beEnriched

Role of dedicated QA in the new age dev

In current times with rapid dev driven by Agile, with testing done by dev folks, is there a need for dedicated QA?  What is dedicated QA really? What  should be the value adding dedicated QA be in the new age dev?
Read more

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 »

SmartBites

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smartbits

||NUGGETS OF LEARNING||

#41

SmartQA Digest

What does it take to do SmartQA? Thoughtful pause, multidimensional thinking, sensitivity and awareness and designing for robustness/testability. A short crisp article continuing from the prior article outlining five more thoughts on what it takes to do SmartQA. Doing SmartQA is about visualising the act in one’s mind and taking steps to being robust and enabling rapid easy validation, outlined in this crisp article FIVE *more* thoughts on ‘Doing SmartQA’ in the expandMind section.

In this edition of SmartBites, listen to two great pieces of advice from Vivek and Shivaji on ‘reinvent yourself’ and ‘staying in sync’ in today’s rapid dev as “Smart Advice #2“. In the nanoLearning section Jawahar Sabapathy helps us understand containerisation & microservices and its role in today’s architecture.

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 »

SmartBites

||VIEWS FROM INDUSTRY LEADERS||

smartbits

||NUGGETS OF LEARNING||

#40 – “Smart Advice #2”

SmartQA Digest

What does it take to do SmartQA? Thoughtful pause, multidimensional thinking, sensitivity and awareness and designing for robustness/testability. A short crisp article continuing from the prior article outlining five more thoughts on what it takes to do SmartQA. Doing SmartQA is about visualising the act in one’s mind and taking steps to being robust and enabling rapid easy validation, outlined in this crisp article FIVE *more* thoughts on ‘Doing SmartQA’ in the expandMind section.

In this edition of SmartBites, listen to two great pieces of advice from Vivek and Shivaji on ‘reinvent yourself’ and ‘staying in sync’ in today’s rapid dev as “Smart Advice #2“. In the nanoLearning section Jawahar Sabapathy helps us understand containerisation & microservices and its role in today’s architecture.

beEnriched

FIVE *MORE* thoughts on ‘Doing SmartQA’

What does it take to do SmartQA? Thoughtful pause, multidimensional thinking, sensitivity and awareness and designing for robustness & testability. A short crisp article continuing from the prior article outlining FIVE MORE thoughts, on what it takes to do SmartQA.

Read More »

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 »

SmartBites

||VIEWS FROM INDUSTRY LEADERS||

smartbits

||NUGGETS OF LEARNING||

#39 – “Doing SmartQA”

SmartQA Digest

What does it take to do SmartQA? How can I do less and accomplish more? What parts of this are human-powered & machine-assisted? It takes a brilliant mindset, intelligent exploration, diligent evaluation, keen observational skills, tech savviness and continual adjustment. It is about being logical yet be creative, it is about being disciplined yet be random, it is about exploring the breadth and depth, it is about understanding deeply and also finding blind spots about being bundled by time but be unlimited/unbounded with the possibilities. Doing SmartQA is about doing mindfully, in a state of brilliant balance, outlined in this crisp article five thoughts on ‘Doing SmartQA’ in the expandMind section.

In this edition of SmartBites, listen to Zulfikar Deen on “Expectations of end users & management from IT team”. In the nanoLearning section Shivaji Raju outlines four key aspects of “What is Digital Testing”.

“A typical accident takes seven consecutive errors” states Malcolm Gladwell, this notion is reflected in Mark Buchanan’s book “Ubiquity”too. The article in the beEnriched section “Seven consecutive errors = A Catastrophe” dwells upon ‘How do you ensure that potential critical failures lurking in systems that have matured can still be uncovered?’

beEnriched

Featured image of article "Five thoughts on doing SmartQA"

FIVE thoughts on ‘Doing SmartQA’

What does it take to do SmartQA? How can I do less and accomplish more? What parts of this are human-powered & machine-assisted? A short crisp article outlining some thoughts, SIX for now on what it takes to do SmartQA.

Read More »

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 »

POSTER

SmartBites

||VIEWS FROM INDUSTRY LEADERS||

smartbits

||NUGGETS OF LEARNING||

#38 – “Failures”

SmartQA Digest

Unilever had a problem. They were manufacturing washing powder at their factory near Liverpool in the northwest of England in the same usual way – forcing boiling hot chemicals through a nozzle at super high levels of pressure. The problem was that the nozzles didn’t work smoothly, they kept clogging up. A crack team of mathematicians, dug deep into problems of phase transition, derived complex equations and after a long time came up with a new design. But it was inefficient. Then the company turned to its biologists, who had no clue of phase transition or fluid dynamics, but they solved it!

 The biologists took tens copies of nozzle, applied small changes in each and subjected them to failure by testing them. After 449 failures they succeeded. Progress had been delivered not through a beautifully constructed master plan but by rapid interaction with the world. A single outstanding nozzle was discovered as a consequence of testing and discarding 449 failures. Check out the book “Black box thinking” in the expandMind section.

“A typical accident takes seven consecutive errors” states Malcolm Gladwell, this notion is reflected in Mark Buchanan’s book “Ubiquity”too. The article in the beEnriched section “Seven consecutive errors = A Catastrophe” dwells upon ‘How do you ensure that potential critical failures lurking in systems that have matured can still be uncovered?’

In this edition of SmartBites, listen to “A mosaic of testing” from NINE practitioners around the world on failures, tools, unit test, clean code, Agile, TDD, feeling & relationship.

In the nanoLearning section Raja Nagendra Kumar outlines the role of refactoring, unit testing in producing clean code. He states this very interestingly as “Technical debt is fat, clean code is liposuction” and crisply explains the act of producing clean code.

beEnriched

Seven consecutive errors = A Catastrophe

“A typical accident takes seven consecutive errors” states Malcolm Gladwell this notion is reflected in the Mark Buchanan’s book “Ubiquity”. This article dwells upon ‘How do you ensure that potential critical failures lurking in systems that have matured can still be uncovered?’

Read More »

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 »

SmartBites

||VIEWS FROM INDUSTRY LEADERS||

smartbits

||NUGGETS OF LEARNING||

#37 – “Smart Advice”

SmartQA Digest

In this edition of SmartBites, listen to four snippets of brilliant advice from Sudhir, Zulfikar, Girish & Jawahar on ownership mindset, big picture, building with quality and understanding internals to validate well in the video “Smart Advice #1
 
In the ‘beEnriched’ section are 22 tips to smart dev & test, TEN tips for a developer to enable delivery of brilliant code and TWELVE tips to become a modern smart tester is what this article is about. 
 
In the nanoLearning section Tathagat Varma beautifully expounds as to what Agility is. He says agility is actually the ability of an organization, in some sense taking a biological definition, somebody or a unit which has an ability to respond to the external stimuli and ensure that their own survival is assured. In the video “Agility – A beautiful explanation
 
“It is easy to make perfect decisions with perfect information. Medicine asks you make perfect decisions with imperfect information” says Siddhartha Mukherjee in the book “The Laws of Medicine: Field Notes from an Uncertain Science”.  Check out what this wonderful book is about HERE

beEnriched

featured image of article 22 tips to smart dev and test

22 tips to smart dev & test

TEN tips for a developer to enable delivery of brilliant code and TWELVE tips to become a modern smart tester is what this article is about. Curated from two earlier articles that I wrote.

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expandMind

SmartBites

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smartbits

||NUGGETS OF LEARNING||

#36 -“On AI”

SmartQA Digest

In the world abuzz with AI, researchers expect AI to outsmart humans at all tasks and jobs within decades, enabling a future where we’re restricted only by the laws of physics, not the limits of our intelligence. MIT physicist and AI researcher Max Tegmark separates the real opportunities and threats from the myths, describing the concrete steps we should take today to ensure that AI ends up being the best — rather than worst — thing to ever happen to humanity in this video “How to get empowered, no overpowered by AI
 
In the ‘beEnriched’ section I have curated a nice article “A short primer on AI” from six interesting articles, starting with a glossary on AI, delving into tacit knowledge as codified via ML going onto understanding the difference between ML & AI. A quick peek into deep learning and challenges of explaining the patterns ending with an interesting piece on AI written by an AI program.
 
“It is easy to make perfect decisions with perfect information. Medicine asks you make perfect decisions with imperfect information” says Siddhartha Mukherjee in the book “The Laws of Medicine: Field Notes from an Uncertain Science”.  Check out what this wonderful book is about HERE

beEnriched

Featured image of article "A quick primer on AI"

A quick primer on AI

This article is curated from SIX articles as a quick primer on AI. Starting with glossary on AI, it delves into tacit knowledge as codified via ML going onto to understanding the difference between ML & AI. A quick peek into deep learning and challenges of explaining the patterns ending with a interesting piece AI written by an AI program

Read More »

expandMind

SmartBites

||VIEWS FROM INDUSTRY LEADERS||

smartbits

||NUGGETS OF LEARNING||

#35 – “Great Expectations”

SmartQA Digest

In today’s world of heightened expectations, what does an organisation and end users expect of IT application team? Zulfikar Deen says end users expect application to work 100%, nothing less, and has a contrarian opinion on DevOps. He also says that management expects to showcase business benefits and hence it is necessary to bake-in metrics of adoption, usage & usability into the application… and much more in the SmartBites video Expectations of end users & management from IT team.
 
In the ‘beEnriched’ section I outline 25 things I expect of a great tester like 
(1) Be disciplined, but stay creative (2) Ask questions, find answers (3) Observe well, see things that are hidden and many more.
 
“It is easy to make perfect decisions with perfect information. Medicine asks you make perfect decisions with imperfect information” says Siddhartha Mukherjee in the book “The Laws of Medicine: Field Notes from an Uncertain Science”.  Check out what this wonderful book is about HERE!

beEnriched

expandMind

SmartBites

||VIEWS FROM INDUSTRY LEADERS||

smartbits

||NUGGETS OF LEARNING||

#34 – A special on “Automation in Agile Dev”

SmartQA Digest

In today’s world of continuous testing, test automation plays a vital part in ensuring the health of released code. It is no more about testing, it is about automating the whole lifecycle of build-test-deploy in the world of Agile/DevOps.
Shivaji Raju outlines the shifts in automation in Agile development and what it takes to accomplish in this week’s SmartBites Video “Automation in Agile Dev“.
 
The article 15 categories of tooling for digital test automation in the ‘beEnriched’ section outlines an interesting visual on automation and tooling and outlines FIFTEEN broad categories that make up the modern digital testing landscape.
 
Have you used Sketchnote to take notes that is more effective and fun? Checkout the nanoLearning section where Anuj Magazine talks about visual thinking and Sketchnotes. And oh, in the “stayInspired” section is THE book on Sketchnote by Mike Rohde. An amazing book that is written by hand using Sketchnotes!

beEnriched

Featured image of article 15 categories of tooling for digital test automation

15 categories of tooling for digital test automation

In this article I have tried picture(ise) the landscape of the plethora of tools for testing software which has moved away from just testing to build-test-deploy in a continuous manner. Keeping the interesting visual I have listed the FIFTEEN broad categories of tools that make up the modern digital testing landscape.

Read More »

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

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smartbits

||NUGGETS OF LEARNING||

#33 – A special on “Build with Quality”

SmartQA Digest

In this edition of SmartBites Video, Girish Elchuri, Founder & CEO of Smuuth Innovative Solutions shares what it to takes to “Build with Quality” rather than ‘test-out’ quality, He shares his perspectives on design, code, process, organisational attitude and the need to execute every line of code as part of early test.
 
In ‘beEnriched’ section the article What does it take to Build In Quality? outlines set of brilliant ideas curated from four articles on with the first suggesting ten ways to build high quality into software, second one from Scaled Agile framework outlining the clear definition of Done, the third highlighting how lean thinking and management helps, and the last outlining how Poka-Yoke can help in mistake proofing.
 

Enjoy the poster “It is not about finding bugs, it is about being sensitive 

how they can creep in that matters.”
 
In ‘nanoLearning’, Raja Nagendra Kumar outlines four key “Habits to Clean Coding”:  ‘Understand that DONE MOVES'(1), ‘There will be bugs, and for heaven’s sake, LEARN and ADJUST’ (2), ‘It is not just about functionality, constantly focus on NFRs’ (3) and ‘Continually re-factor right so that you don’t get into ‘fire’.(4)

beEnriched

expandMind

SmartBites

||VIEWS FROM INDUSTRY LEADERS||

smartbits

||NUGGETS OF LEARNING||