In this episode Matthew and Federico sit down to talk about test Contexts, and how our team uses this concept in automation. Positive and negative points are discussed as well as the challenges that the QA team faces when applying the concept in excess.

• News
  • The ASP.NET QA team is hiring! If you are interested in working in our team please send us your resume.
  • Podcast is now accessible via Zune
• Contexts
• What are "contexts" or "variations"?
• Some of the contexts that we use: TrustLevel, Impersonation, Browsers, ViewState, UNC, RemoteServer, SmartNav, etc.
• Pros: breadth coverage, cheap for the tester, confidence of no points missed.
• Cons: excessive results, skip evaluation of test value, maintainability cost is often disregarded.
• What is the situation in our team? The challenge of maintaining a 10 year old product.

In this episode Matthew and Federico continue to elaborate on the concept of treating the QA role as a “service” and discuss some of the feedback and discussion that has carried on during the week with their co-workers.

News

• Federico has been confirmed as a speaker for Dev Connections!

QA as a “service” revisited

• Feedback / Discussion
  • The Dev and PM roles also provide a service to the QA role.
  • A service is optional, QA is not optional.
  • QA provides lots of value why do you say we need to work on providing it?
• Continued discussion of QA as a “service”
  • What is the problem that treating QA as a “service” solves?
    • Perceptions of the QA team’s value.
    • Divisions between disciplines.
  • QA as a “Service” is just the beginning and should be part of a bigger picture.

In this episode Matthew and Federico discuss what it means to treat the QA role as a “service” rather than a “requirement”.

News

• Fede has a new blog about testing.
• Fede to give a QA talk at Dev Connections

QA as a service

• Signs that development team sees QA as a burden.
• Difference in QA cultures:
• “some else is responsible, they need to change”
• “influence others by changing yourself”
• Think of QA as a service provider and the rest of the development team as the consumer. Strive to give as much value.
• Perception and reputation and why it’s important to provide value that is tangible to the rest of the team.
• Change the QA response from “no, we can’t do take that work”, to “how can we find something that works”.
• Increase awareness across the development team about what, how and why the QA team does what it does.
• First hand anecdotes from our team.

In this show Matthew and Federico share their experiences working as testers in the MVC feature crew. They go over how the team works, the development lifecycle from a QA point of view, the principles that the team adopted as well as an honest assessment of what didn’t go so well.

• News
  • MVC 2 Preview 1 released
  • What's new in MVC 2 (ScottGu)
    • Ability to easily partition and group functionality across an MVC application.
    • Ability to use Data Annotation attributes to validate input.
    • Ability to use Data Annotation attributes to drive the generation of UI in the Views (ala Dynamic Data)
    • Strongly typed UI-Helpers
• Inside the MVC team
  • Lifecycle of a "feature": Idea -> Prototype -> Exploratory Testing -> Review -> Application Building -> Automation (Rinse & Repeat)
  • Challenges of testing an installer.
  • Development principles
    • QA is involved during design.
    • All feature check-ins are previously approved by Dev/Test/PM
    • All check-ins contain unit tests
    • QA drives the schedule
    • Weekly test plan.
  • What could had gone better
    • QA not working close enough with Devs.
    • A lot of non-MVC work caused a lot of distractions.
    • Big bug debt coming in from MVC 1.0
    • Ramp up time for new QA members took longer than expected.