Testing Smarter with Rikard Edgren
This interview with Rikard Edgren is part of our series of “Testing Smarter with…” interviews. Our goal with these interviews is to highlight insights and experiences as told by many of the software testing field’s leading thinkers.
Rikard Edgren has been a humanistic and technical tester since 1998. He currently works with testing healthcare software at Nordic Medtest in Karlstad, Sweden. Rikard enjoys the dynamics between people/machines, objective/subjective and whole/details.
Read the full interview here: Testing Smarter with Rikard Edgren
Excerpts from the interview:
Hexawise: In your book, The Little Black Book On Test Design, you write: "You want to create tests that are testworthy, and typical examples can be those tests where you don’t know if it is important or not, but you want to make sure." How often do you see software developers providing guidance on testing focus due to concerns about the code? My background is in software development and often we know when certain aspects of the code have higher potential for bugs - often due to complexity or novelty. But in my experience this insight (that could focus software testing) is not provided as often as would be useful.
Rikard: In my experience I haven't received important information like this on direct questions. However, when I have worked together with the developers for some time, and (hopefully) have earned respect by digging up interesting information, this sort of guidance come more and more often. I hope it is because they realize that my testing can act on vague and disparate information, and that they value the findings and want more of it. It doesn't seem to be enough to say that you can test the software well, you have to actually do it first in order to gain a healthy respect that everyone benefit from.
Once the trust is there, communication is more open and better, and it is easier also for me to admit areas where the testing wasn't the best.
Respect isn't given, it must be earned, and you do that by finding information others need, that they wouldn't have found by themselves.
Hexawise: Do you have any specific suggestions on how testers can gain respect from developers and encourage them to see a tester as someone to assist them in creating great software. Too often it seems software developers can view software testers as a bother rather than a help?
Rikard: Make sure you provide valuable information. Find bugs the developers want to fix. Give feedback on things that work well. Find bugs that other stakeholders want to fix. Listen to developers input on what needs testing. Collaborate. Be nice and do good work.
Hexawise: What do you wish more developers, business analysts, and project managers understood about software testing?
Rikard: That it is difficult, but done well software testing provides a lot of value to any software where quality is important (but not every project needs testing!)
That they can influence us: tell us about what is important, and we will find out useful stuff about this (good and bad things.)
That automation is great, and exploratory testing too.
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Read the full interview here: Testing Smarter with Rikard Edgren
Read previous interviews:
- Testing Smarter with Michael Bolton
- Testing Smarter with Mike Bland
- Testing Smarter with Alan Page
- Testing Smarter with Dorothy Graham
- Testing Smarter with James Bach