People in Testing

People in Testing Q&A with Stephen Janaway

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Stephen Janaway - Adventures in QAThis time in “People in Testing” I had the chance to interview Stephen Janaway, who is a well known expert in the mobile and e-commerce software testing world. Stephen has more than 15 years of experience and worked for companies like Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola and the Net-a-Porter Group.

In this interview Stephen will talk about his challenges he is currently facing, which test automation tool he is using, where he sees the software testing industry in the next years and the best bug he has ever found.

Daniel: Stephen, what is currently your biggest challenge at work?

Stephen: I’m working on a new social commerce platform. It’s a real greenfield project and a new direction for both the company and the team. And me. So it’s a very steep learning curve but a really enjoyable and challenging one. There’s a lot of testing to do and we’re trying to do things as sensibly as possible; employing both automation and good exploratory testing using the whole team.

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People in Testing Q&A with Lisa Crispin

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Lisa Crispin - Adventures in QAToday, I want to start a new series on my blog. This series is called “People in Testing”. The goal of this series is to interview people who are working as a software tester or working with software testers to share their current challenges, ideas, test tools they are using and many more.
When I came up with the idea, I was always asking myself, what kind of testing challenges might have Lisa Crispin, Stephen Janaway or other software testers. While visiting conferences I was able to talk to many people from the software testing industry and I exchanged with them on current challenges and problems. The discussions and insights I had were very interesting and pushed me to introduce this new series. In the next upcoming weeks, there will be more interviews with software testers from around the world and from different kind of industries.

I hope you enjoy the first interview with Lisa Crispin one of the most influential agile testing expert and the co-author of the books Agile Testing and More Agile Testing.

Daniel: Lisa, what is currently your biggest challenge at work?

Lisa: There are so many! One huge source of frustration is another tester and I paired to automate some UI regression test scripts for our iOS app. It was hard but also fun and we got a good set of scripts. However, we have not been able to get them to run in our CI, and that needs to happen for them to have value. Some of the programmers have tried to help but no one has found the solution.

However I would say my biggest challenge overall is that our team does TDD well, and automates tests at all levels from unit up to UI, but does not use higher-level tests to guide development. Because of this, requirements often get missed. I haven’t been successful in getting the team to adopt practices that would help everyone get a shared understanding of the story or feature before they start coding.

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