30 Days of Testability

The 30 Days of Testing Challenge is back!

The time, the theme is Testability and this challenge has been kindly sponsored by Tricentis - be sure to check out their demos and trials for the resources, tools and training for the Tricentis platform.

These challenges are a great way to learn on your own, as a team effort or join in with the wonderful Ministry of Testing community online.

Below is a list of 30 challenges and a bonus challenge developed by Rob Meaney and Ash Winter, one for each day of the month. Download the PDF. Save it somewhere. Print it out. Stick it on your wall. Let’s do this!

What are the rules?

The goal is to tick off as many of the challenges as you can. You can do this in your own timeframe, or you can join us in our joint community effort throughout the month of March. We will be encouraging the community to share their progress on this challenge from the 1st of March 2019. 

You may have an image to share, a blog post, a video, a status update, whatever it is!  Come and participate!

Here is how you can participate and share your progress:

• On Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn – use the #30DaysOfTesting hashtag
• On our 30 Days of Testing category in The Club
• Download the PDF

30 Days of Testability, the text version

1. Define what you believe testability is. Share your definitions on The Club.
2. Perform some testing on your application, then open your applications log files. Can you find the actions you performed in the logs? 
3. Begin reading a book related to testability and share your learnings by Day 30. 
4. Do you know what your top three customer impacting issues are? How could you find out?
5. What monitoring system is used for your application? Do the alerts it has configured reflect what you test? 
6. Explore the output of your applications analytics, how can they help guide your testing? 
7. Find out if your application has an operational manual or runbook? How can you test this? 
8. Share a video about testability with your testing peers at your company. 
9. In your next story kick off session ask, ‘how are we going to test this?’ Share the test ideas and techniques that are suggested. 
10. Follow and share three people on LinkedIn/ Twitter who regularly talk about testability. 
11. Get access to your source control and find the active branches for your application. Has anything changed that you didn’t consider? 
12. Decomposability is an important part of testability. Complete our circuit breakers testing exercise over on The Club! 
13. Find out how test data is populated in your system. How could it be improved? You can watch Techniques for Generating and Managing Test Data by Omose Ogala for some ideas to get you started. 
14. Watch the Testability Ask Me Anything on the Dojo. Post any additional questions on The Club. 
15. Share a blog post that you found interesting related to testability. Don’t forget to use the hashtag #30DaysofTesting if you share on Twitter. 
16. Conduct a show and tell of the latest features in your application for staff outside your immediate team. Capture their feedback and share with your team.
17. Pair with a developer to see if they can improve something that you find difficult or time consuming to test. We have a handy guide from Lisa Crispin on Pairing with Developers: A Guide for Testers that’s worth a read. 
18. Note the top 3 challenges you have while testing and raise them at the team retrospective. 
19. Your dependencies can constrain your testability. Head over to The Club to visualise your applications boundaries.
20. Think about what’s currently stopping you from achieving higher testability. Share your findings on The Club. 
21. Unit tests provide insight into an applications testability. Pair with a developer to explore some unit tests. 
22. How long does it take to set up a new test environment and start testing. Could this be faster?
23. Share an article about application log levels and how they can be applied.
24. What could you learn about your application’s testability from being on call for support? This eBook could help you get the most out of taking support calls. 
25. Ask your team if there are any areas of the system they fear to change. How could you mitigate that fear?
26. Relationships with other teams affect testability. Share your experiences on The Club. 
27. Use source control history to find out which parts of your system change most often. Compare with your regression test coverage.
28. Pair with an internal user or customer support person and explore your application together. Share your findings on The Club. 
29. Do you know which components of your application respond the slowest? How could you find out? 
30. What book did you choose on Day 3 and what did you learn from it? 
31. Bonus: Arrange a meeting with your team to take the team testability test over at http://testabilityquestions.com/