Episode 5: Critical Thinking in Test Design with Paul Gerrard

Inside The Outer Loop

In this episode, Paul Gerrard, award-winning software engineering consultant, author and coach, brings his experience to Inside The Outer Loop! Together with Curiosity Software's hosts Huw Price and Rich Jordan, Paul Gerrard discusses the difficulties of organisational hierarchies and how to identify ‘stakeholders’ as your ‘internal testing customers’. Co-host Rich shares his experience of looking over a test data team, unpacking one of his favoured mantras of ‘go slower to go faster', doing so as a caution to not just relying on your technology capability, which might be brilliant, but did it solve any problem? In practice this requires analysing the problem as a means of arriving at consensus, and not in any way the much derided ‘analysis paralysis’. Consensus should be applauded as it allows teams to get agile “with a small 'a” and beyond solely considering technology capabilities. Guest Paul then focuses our attention on the value brought to the software delivery by testers, in that their insight and analysis brings us closer to the problem, beyond any supposed solution. With that in mind co-host Huw informs us on the primary of role of testers, and the need to align their purpose as being critical thinkers within quality assurance. He caveats this to impress it’s more about open than it is dogmatic dialogue. An open dialogue helps plug any blind spots stakeholders may have and leads to demonstrable improvements and time savings across a system and/or processes. Though, these beneficial outcomes of eased communication between stakeholder and tester and vice-versa happens more fluidly in smaller teams. And that’s where risk workshops can help determine business goals and avoid projects shutting down in flames within larger organisations. These workshops act as a tool for triggering input from broader stakeholders within an organisation’s hierarchy. From this can evolve a crossover of perceptions for deciding and prioritising critical outcomes of any software delivery process. Co-host Rich cautions us though, in that testers need to avoid jumping quickly to answering issues through the language of risk and resiliency which usually lead to ‘functional or performance' testing alone. Instead he promotes the need to foresee and map the requirements that need to be proven to ‘accountable’ stakeholders beforehand. So too there’s a raft of interpersonal skills including imagination and critical thinking from testers which can be priceless in early stage challenging to plug gaps in requirements. The outcome of which gives a firmer grasp and understanding how software should function. Inside the outer loop – brought to you by the Curiosity Software team! Together with industry leaders and experts, we uncover actionable strategies to navigate the outer loop of software delivery, streamline test data management, and elevate software quality. Tune in to transform the way you think about software delivery, quality, and productivity!