Five Questions With Adam White

Adam White manages Test Engineering and Escalations for PlateSpin. He makes the most of this dual role by using the customer problems he encounters to drive changes in his team's testing process and thus reduce the need for future escalations. As Test Manager part of Adam's job entails engaging his testers in philosophical discussions about testing and living his belief that teaching testing is more about helping people improve their ability to think about software than it is about instructing them in any particular technique or methodology. He also tinkers with neural networks and adaptive systems and such as he experiments with processes for analyzing financial markets and otherwise managing risks of various sorts.

Here is what Adam has to say:

DDJ: What has most surprised you as you have learned about testing/in your experiences with testing?
AKW: I remember working for a young start-up company near release and we were still finding bugs rapidly. Ship time arrived and the business side decided to ship the software. I was actually told "Stop testing - If you keep testing we will keep finding bugs. We can live with the bugs you have found. We have to ship the software". I realized that in commercial business-to-business software it's about the company's ability to manage the confidence and risk of the customer, not about finding every bug.

DDJ: What is the most interesting bug you have seen?
AKW: Do I have to pick just one? :) A scheduling dialog exhibited some interesting behavior found by Aqiqul Hoda, a tester on my team. The dialog contained a date/time control. If you had the date/time dialog open when the computer time changed to be on the hour an unhandled exception would appear. Aqiqul logged a bug for the unhandled exception without knowing the root cause. All of us thought he was crazy - until he reproduced it later in the afternoon. Eventually we did enough diagnosing and troubleshooting to get to the root cause. It was an amazing bug and great team troubleshooting.

DDJ: How would you describe your testing philosophy?
AKW: My testing philosophy used to be about stopping the shipping of bad software (bad in my opinion). Now my philosophy is focused on managing the confidence and risk of project stakeholders. My primary aim is to provide stakeholders with accurate and timely information so the project team can make informed business decisions about the software.

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?
AKW: One of the most important things for me has been keeping my skills sharp. I'd like people to remember to practice the testing craft not only at work but in everyday life. Let testing permeate your life. Always try to look for new and interesting ways to do things.

I do this by reading a lot and testing random programs that I know nothing about, just for the sake of learning and keeping my skills sharp. I have gotten involved in testing communities and attended dinner meetings and conferences. I also do things that put me outside my comfort zone like improv classes. All of these things link back to my work.

DDJ: What do you see as the biggest challenge for testers/the test discipline for the next five years?
AKW: The biggest challenge I see for testers is finding ways to test smarter. Systems are getting complex with technology, scenarios and interactions. This creates a huge testing space. It's no longer sufficient (and in some contexts never was acceptable) to bang away at the keyboard and hope "bad things happen".

The challenge for the testing discipline is getting fresh, young blood to pursue testing as a career. The testing world tends to get ignored in university curriculums and isn't even considered as a career option by most university graduates.

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

Posted by The Braidy Tester at 07:30 AM  Permalink