Testing "Software" Times

Shift left is a phrase often heard in software development. There are many ways you can do this. You can get testers involved at the story writing stage or get testers testing on feature branches before the code goes into master. But what can you do though to shift left your automation? Now let's imagine you have someone who writes UI test automation. Let's call them a test automation engineer. Now this person would typically write tests after the developer has finished their work. Now on the face of it this is great, they can write some tests whilst the developer starts on another feature. However, this creates its own problems. If the test automation engineer has questions or finds issues they have to interrupt the developer and get some answers. This feedback loop could be quite long which could delay the releasing of the feature and more importantly delaying the value to the user of that feature. What if there was another way….. Now shifting left is about getting testing pe...

In this post I am going to talk about monitoring and observability. Now what are monitoring and observability? Monitoring is defined as….. "to watch and check a situation carefully for a period of time in order to discover something about it" From <https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/monitoring> Observability is defined as….. "to watch carefully the way something happens or the way someone does something, especially in order to learn more about it" From <https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/observe?q=Observing> So the main difference between the 2 is that one is around checking to discover something whilst the other is about watching something in order to learn more about it. Why are both important? They are both important as they can tell us different things about a system and can provide us with information that can feed into decisions and actions that can be made both now and in the future to improve software quality as ...

Feedback is important. In fact feedback is what helps us improve and enables us to make informed decisions at the correct time. For example imagine you are driving a car in icy weather and the steering goes light. This feedback tells you that you need to take action as it is likely your car has started to slide. So feedback can help us take action to keep us safe and without it the human race would still be stuck in the dark ages. Now typically you will be asked for feedback in the following types of situations: Feedback on a training course Feedback on colleges for the appraisal process However, there is more to feedback than that. This post will talk about why feedback is important, the effects of slow feedback and how if this feedback was quicker how it would lead to better outcomes. What is feedback? Here’s the definition from Wikpedia: “information about reactions to a product, a person's performance of a task, etc. which is used as a basis for improvement.” So feedback is all...