CAST 2016

Many software development companies claim they don’t have testers. They claim that practices like TDD, Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment, and production monitoring eliminate the need for separate testing groups and phases. While this attitude is concentrated in startups and Silicon Valley companies, knowledge of these techniques is spreading, and “platform as a service” technologies, containerization, and increasingly mature CI frameworks are making it easier for enterprises to bring these practices to their internal software development projects.

This might sound like a threat to the livelihood of skilled testers. Some of the appeal of these practices to large enterprises is definitely in the opportunity to get rid of low-value “quality assurance” departments.

However, these are often exactly the places where skilled explorers should want to work. When you solve the boring, tedious problems that take up much of many testers’ time, “exploration” becomes a high status skillset with applications across the software development process.

I’ll share how the tools and practices that Pivotal uses (without a formal test phase) work, and how they make it and companies like it a great place to be an explorer. I’ll describe how the role of “engineer with a subspecialty in exploration” has evolved as we’ve learned more about the weaknesses of our existing feedback systems, and how a more formal approach to exploration fits into our practices. I’ll also talk about how to use testing skills to get a job at a company that “doesn’t have testers,” and about how to implement these practices at your own company, while highlighting some common pitfalls.