Courage


Mental or moral strength to venture, persevere, and withstand danger, fear, or difficulty

We left courage for last, but for a tester it may be the most important of the four values. XP can be scary from a tester's point of view. As a tester, the prospect of writing, automating, and performing tests at top speed in one- to three-week iterations, without the benefit of traditional requirements documents, feels at first like driving down a steep, winding, one-lane mountain road with no guardrails. Programmers who lack experience automating acceptance tests may find this prospect equally daunting.

A tester may fear looking stupid to the customer because she overlooked a giant defect. The fact that the customer's story and acceptance test did not cover the area of the giant defect will not mitigate this feeling. You need courage to help the customer define acceptance criteria and test to those criteria.

You need courage to let the customer make mistakes. Maybe he doesn't want to invest in some of the tests you recommend. You'll all find out quickly whether this was a good decision, and everyone's testing skills will improve with time.

A tester may fear looking stupid to the others on the team by asking for help. If you're pair testing with someone who's not familiar with your work and your test script stops working, you may feel defensive and embarrassed. You need courage to work in pairs.

As the tester and everyone on an XP team is a tester to some extent you need the courage to determine the minimum testing requirement proving an iteration's success. Does this mean you do an incomplete job of testing? Nope. As they say in the Air Force, if it weren't good enough, it wouldn't be the minimum. Testers can always find another test to do, another angle to check out. Knowing when to stop testing takes a lot of courage.

Testers have to help the customer decide how much testing is enough. A customer who has a lot riding on a software package is going to worry that no amount of testing can ever be enough.

Being the only tester on an XP project of four, six, eight, or more programmers can feel lonely at times. You may need courage to ask a busy programmer to pair with you to develop an executable test. You may need courage to convince your team to include test support tasks along with the other stories and assume responsibility for the acceptance tests. You may sometimes feel you're constantly asking for help and support from people who don't necessarily have the same immediate priorities you have. It may take more courage to ask for help than to try to soldier on alone. Ask!

Acceptance tests provide feedback, which is often good news. Your team might not take particular notice of that. What they notice is all the bad news you bring by discovering defects and bringing up issues. Bearing bad tidings as tactfully as possible is a courageous act. You need not just bravery but persistence and a thick skin, because programmers in the midst of an iteration don't always want to stop and look at bugs. You have the right to ask for help anytime, but this doesn't mean it will always feel good to have to ask.

If you're working on a project where something the technology, the domain is new to you, you may need courage to ask questions and learn something. Remember you're never alone on an XP team. If you have problems, your team is there to help you (although they may need gentle prodding). Embrace new challenges that come up, and enjoy the adventure!



Testing Extreme Programming
Testing Extreme Programming
ISBN: 0321113551
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 238

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