Five Questions With Wayne Miller

Wayne Miller is a Supporting Architect with the Enterprise Application Architecture Team at ExxonMobil. Which is to say that he spends his time helping people across his company find ways to solve their testing problems. One day he's advising senior architects on long term testing strategy, the next day he's helping frontline testers with their functional testing, and the day after that he's assisting usability and ergonomics groups innovate in their work. Sounds like fun to me!

Here is what Wayne has to say:

DDJ: What do you think is the most important thing for a tester to know? To do? For developers to know and do about testing?
WCM: Johanna Rothman wrote something that changed the way I think about quality, “Shipping your product is a business decision, not a quality decision.” This is how I’ve achieved what Kent Beck calls “Ease at Work.” I think testers can get very frustrated with work because they are passionate about making the product the best it can be. The irony of software is that it’s never done, and you can chase this goal until you burn out. As Johanna suggests, once you focus your testing energy into providing a forecast of deployment risk to the stakeholders – you can find peace in your work.

DDJ: What has most surprised you as you have learned about testing/in your experiences with testing?
WCM: I am always surprised how consistently test effort is underestimated in this industry. Fred Brooks said 30 years ago, “…few allowed one-half of the project schedule for testing, but that most did indeed spend half of the actual schedule for that purpose.” I think that’s still very common today. I struggle with understanding the forces that perpetuate it. I believe that just about everyone understands the value of testing early. I believe that just about everyone expects troublesome bugs to appear as the product progresses. Across the industry, software project managers and their teams have years of experience. Why do we – the industry - keep repeatedly underestimating testing effort?

DDJ: What was your first introduction to testing? What did that leave you thinking about the act and/or concept of testing?
WCM: It’s hard to remember my first introduction. I often feel like I’m constantly being introduced to testing. It amazes me how many niche testing fields there are in software development – it’s not just enough to have confidence that the application works anymore (maybe it never was). Once you’ve really gotten involved with it full-time, you see how much there is that you have to look at to certify an app – security, load, endurance, usability – it’s a long list. Maybe that’s why we underestimate it.

DDJ: What do you see as the biggest challenge for testers/the test discipline for the next five years?
WCM: Getting developers to be more rigorous about automated unit testing.

I am a big supporter of the concept of Test-Driven Development (TDD). TDD transforms the health of software and opens the gateway to other kinds of tests and QA. I only have anecdotes, but the projects at ExxonMobil that are more disciplined about their unit tests develop faster and with lower bug rates than the projects that do not.

Talking to vendors, I think it is pretty clear that manual testing is still king in the industry, and that has to change. Our systems are becoming more and more interconnected; we have to be able to reliably test these systems as quickly and efficiently as possible.

I think the prize in Service Oriented Architecture demands disciplined test automation to succeed. I don’t believe that manual testing is going to keep pace managing large interconnected systems that are being modified by many people across many locations and groups. It’s not enough that some of our software teams do this well; I think this is a practice that we need to spread consistently throughout our organization.

DDJ: Is there anything else you would like to say?
WCM: One of the new things our testing groups are doing is to start to take a look at the ergonomics of our applications and workflows.

Today, new hires in their early 20s come to work with 15 years or more of wear and tear on their wrists, neck, and back. We want to ensure our employees can maintain the intensity and enjoyment they have for computing when they are 51 or 61 that they had when they were 21.

I’ve appreciated that ExxonMobil takes this commitment seriously and extends beyond just our own internally developed applications. Ergonomics and usability of our applications is a fundamental priority of senior management. We’re working with vendors to develop more usable, ergonomic applications. We continue to extend our network of internal and external ergonomic experts to devise ways to make literally healthier applications and environments for our users.

For us, there is a lot to do and to learn, but developing more ergonomic applications is a win for everyone. Developers take a lot of pride in the effort they put into their applications. They want feedback that gives their applications graceful UIs. Users love transparent applications that allow them to focus on their business problem and forget the tool. Everybody wins from intuitive, integrated applications where no one gets hurt.

[See my Table Of Contents post for more details about this interview series.]

Posted by The Braidy Tester at 07:30 AM  Permalink