〈 This post was originally published on April 25, 2018 at COMPLEXITY IS A MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE 〉
So far I have mostly thought that “Modern Testing” of the A/B testing podcast would never work in an enterprise context. But it seems some tools and existing approaches in the enterprises already fits well with the ideas of the concept.
The enterprise is all the privately owned companies that usually manufacture (non-IT) things – for either the consumer or other businesses. The enterprise sell and produce tangible products like windmills, power tools, dairy consumer products etc. The interest with regards to IT for the enterprise is that it just works, and supports business processes around order setup, order tracking and invoicing – and many other moving parts.
While I have heard of some organisations that have successfully implemented some agile and SaFe methods (in banking), the enterprise have a hard time to change mode of operations, as it usually comes down to actual production of things, logistics and hierarchies of command-and-control … and culture, most of all culture.
Some enterprises change towards being learning organisations, but still treat their IT in general as low-value and an annoying cost. It seems the IT departments and IT contractors have a challenge in talking about what they do to achieve the right quality for the businesses….
Que: The Modern testing mission on “Accelerate the achievement of Shippable Quality”. While MT is mostly a concept around transition of testing activities, it seems the concept applies to IT delivery teams in general. MT has 7 principles and some of these are:
5. We believe that the customer is the only one capable to judge and evaluate the quality of our product
Most enterprise projects I know off around implementing SAP, MS dynamics 365, EPIC hospital solutions etc, have a large reliance on end-user testing and UAT. Often there is no professional testers involved, as the best tester is the business expertsthemselves. Interestingly the principle #5 fit’s well with existing practices from the UAT space.
Another interesting MT principle is #6 around data analysis of actual customer usage. This requires some totally different tooling for the tester, than previously generally available (…besides shifting-right perhaps…).
6. We use data extensively to deeply understand customer usage and then close the gaps between product hypotheses and business impact.
Yet recently I was investigating Panaya Autonomous Testing for SAP. One thing I realized is that what the tool collects real user usage of SAP and then provides the ability to balance the testing activities based on that analysis. It is interesting to see a commercial test management product for the enterprises following new trends like the “modern tester”.
While it’s interesting how some of the concepts of modern testing are reflected in testing in the enterprise – and vise versa – the challenge remains for both the tools and concepts to be applied and accepted in more organisations.
It might not fit everywhere, but it might be a good fit in more places than you think it would.