Test Like a Mother
Don’t believe motherhood is bootcamp for app testing? Grab a cuppa, or some milk and cookies, and let me try to convince you.
“I’m ready for school, Mum.”
“Have you brushed your teeth?”
Comes back from brushing teeth. “Ready to go now, Mum.”
“Your lunchbox is in the fridge.”
Returns from putting lunch in his school bag. “I’m really, really ready now.”
Little did I realise when starting at Adapptor, returning to the workforce after years of being a stay-at-home mum, what a rich training ground motherhood had been for testing. Let me explain.
Below are eight skills crucial to parenting. They’re also reported to be essential for testing.
🏠 One of my favourite parenting tips is: Train, don’t retrain. Your toddler taking off their clothes in public is a laugh; your seventeen-year-old son taking off their clothes in public is a lawsuit.
👷♀ Finding and fixing bugs ASAP is money.
🏠 If I’m not specific enough with the kids, “Get ready for breakfast” means watch YouTube until mum reaches DEFCON 2.
👷♀️ Writing detailed daily updates and having face-to-face time enables other testers to know what has and hasn’t been covered, so they don’t waste time trying to work it out.
🏠 I had a child who needed a haircut but hated the clippers. My solution was the two-stage haircut: a week of mohawk followed by the full cut.
👷♀️ We don’t have daylight savings in Western Australia, but our east coast clients do. Make sure we cover that in testing.
4. Attention to detail
🏠 Occasionally I forgot to check every possible thing my kids might have touched when left in the car while I unpacked shopping. The results were both hilarious (hello full-volume radio and full-blast air conditioning) and frustrating (hello flat battery because one tiny light was left on).
👷♀️ I love finding spelling and punctuation errors. A recent example was hassel vs. hassle… and then I started wondering if hastle was the right spelling. (It’s not.) Always remember, the panda says ‘No’. And, if you think this is being pedantic, it matters to users.
🏠 I once wrote “T-shirts” on a holiday packing list. One child interpreted this to mean one T-shirt, plus the one he was wearing. I’m so thankful for op shops and Target Country.
👷♀️ Writing test cases with clear step-by-step instructions means when bugs are found they can be reproduced easily by other testers and developers.
6. Creativity and curiosity
🏠 Through experimentation I have found all manner of ways to include plenty of vegetables in the kids’ diet.
👷♀️ Through experimentation I have found all manner of ways to break an app. What happens when I fill in this form in an unexpected order? I can submit the form with an invalid entry. Can I do this anywhere else? We love finding and fixing bugs, so our clients don’t have to see them.
7. Adaptability (Adapptorbility?)
🏠 Problem: I have three hangry kids, the husband needs to be at basketball in an hour, and I just burned dinner. Now what? *
👷♀️ When a platform — such as iOS — is due to upgrade, I research the upcoming changes, anticipate how our apps might be impacted, test they work as expected with the upgrade, and make necessary changes to test cases.
8. An ability to negotiate
🏠 Teenagers. Toddlers. Need I say more?
👷♀️ Sometimes testers are blocked on client-side infrastructure — maybe there’s a web endpoint that won’t be ready for weeks, or perhaps it would be expensive to hit it with a bunch of crazy test traffic. That’s when it’s good to talk about how we can avoid stepping on each other’s toes while keeping the project on time.
Motherhood jokes aside, at Adapptor we take testing seriously. It starts early in a project, from working out requirements with our clients, and continues all the way to delivery and beyond. We have dedicated testers, but that doesn’t mean no one else gets in on the action — it’s a mindset our developers and project managers maintain. We also happily integrate with clients’ test teams for great coverage, from unit testing to end-to-end testing on cloud device farms.
The ground in mobile apps is continually shifting — platforms update, new devices are released, third parties your app depends on change things (and break things), and traffic load can fluctuate by the second. As mobile devices increase in complexity the catalogue of bugs grows and the places they can hide proliferate. A single type of test won’t uncover all problems. That’s why we execute a variety: exploratory, regression, bug fix testing, functional, to name a few.
And, by the way, an app doesn’t have to be developed at Adapptor for us to test it. We can test an existing app and offer bug fix solutions and improvements.
* In case you were wondering, the answer to the burned meal is brinner, obviously.
