LearningWell held a well-attended seminar on testing

On Thursday, LearningWell held a well-attended seminar on the social and cultural challenges surrounding testing. The lecturers were Anders Åslund who spoke about "STDD - experiences from the road towards a more modern development method" and Rikard Edgren who gave an "Introduction to test strategy".

Rikard Edgren and Anders Åslund were presenters.

The LearningWell seminar was arranged in collaboration with Compare within the framework of the CompareAkademien – an opportunity for Compare companies to get help with premises, marketing and administration of registrations for seminars. CompareAkademien offers – in collaboration with partners – free breakfast seminars, lunch seminars, workshops or other forms of lectures.

"The collaboration with Compare helped us get the invitation to the seminar quickly and easily - and we also got more participants than we dared to hope for," says Katarina Brunsson at LearningWell in Karlstad.

Thursday's seminar with Anders Åslund and Rikard Edgren attracted about 40 listeners - most from other Compare companies but also from other companies and public organizations.

"Many of the participants work with tests - therefore it gave us a good opportunity to market, among other things, the testing association SAST Värmland and its upcoming quarterly meeting," explains Sven Wedemalm at Compare Testlab and chairman of SAST Värmland.

Anders Åslund shared his experiences with System Test Driven Development (STDD) from a large and a smaller project at Svenska Spel where both technical and cultural challenges were tackled in both good and bad ways.

The biggest challenges in introducing System Test Driven Development (STDD) are not just the technical ones. Much is about the social and cultural challenges. On an individual level, motivational factors play a big role, not only to reach new levels of competence, but also to be able to take a more active role. STDD is not a technical solution but has a complex impact on both the developer team and the microculture of the project. Technology choices are important, in an automatic chain dependencies are created that must be anticipated and with knowledge these can be used to advantage. STDD opens up a range of possibilities and we are constantly seeing new possibilities. This also means that STDD requires more than handing over a number of automated steps; competence and understanding must also be implemented at the organization that inherits the product.

System Test Driven Development (STDD) is a concept for creating efficiency in the entire development chain by combining agile methods with modern technologies for efficient system development. The concept is based on automation of most steps in the construction and testing process. This enables continuous testing and automatic verification of the system that visualizes the project's progress. Deviations and bugs are caught directly through immediate feedback to everyone in the project - and thus costs and risks can be minimized. Requirements and customer benefit are always at the center and drive development.

Richard Edgren gave examples of test strategies and told about their strengths and weaknesses as well as what mental tools you can use to get a multi-faceted strategy with a good chance of catching what's important.

In order to test in a good way, you need to find out what information the stakeholders need. Gone are the days when testers could follow a requirement specification and check off, you need to understand both the big picture and details and be able to communicate it effectively.

With an infinite test space, it is difficult to choose what to test and how - you have to make important strategic decisions. Rikard Edgren went through a couple of examples of test strategies and talked about their strengths and weaknesses as well as which mental tools you can use to get a multifaceted strategy with good chances of capturing what is important.