A Citizen Test, Users Move Closer To Software Development

Cloud A Citizen Test, Users Move Closer To Software Development Adrian Bridgwater Senior Contributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. I track enterprise software application development & data management. New! Follow this author to stay notified about their latest stories.

Got it! Sep 1, 2022, 02:31am EDT | New! Click on the conversation bubble to join the conversation Got it! Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin First class status for ‘ordinary’ users as software testers, if the system is well-managed we can . . .

[+] all ride up front now. Adrian Bridgwater This app stinks. We’ve all said something along those lines at some point or another after downloading an application that we find lacks the intuitive self-service efficiency of the apps that we know and love i.

e. the ones that we come back to every day on our smartphones and other devices. More productive would be a situation where the use of ‘stinky apps’ sees us feedback to the software application developers and operations engineering teams building and releasing these less-than-perfect applications in the first place.

Don’t just Twitter-rant Ideally, what we’re suggesting here is more than just a rant on Twitter aimed at the corporate @handle belonging to the makers of the software in use; this is a more structured and method-based systematic channel to feedback and (hopefully) even improve the software app in question. We’ve heard a lot about so-called citizen developers and the rise of low-code & no-code software application development platforms, so this is citizen users getting a new testing role – this is citizen testing. Finland-based Esko Hannula thinks there is a place for this role amongst the average user base, but it is a process that comes with some caveats and care factors if we are going to do it right.

Hannula is vice president of robotic testing at low-code Salesforce-specialist software management company Copado , although his firm specializes in testing automation, he has a wide-ranging view on how, when, where and why human citizen testers can play a role. MORE FOR YOU Western Digital’s Journey To Build Business Resiliency Through Cloud And ERP Transformation Amazon Climate Pledge: Two Years In And Going Strong Microsoft Takes First Steps To Finally Kill The Password “Our planet is already home to a huge number of citizen testers – including you and me. Whenever you find an application to be buggy or a website not working and tell somebody about it, you are a citizen tester,” said Hannula.

“A citizen developer is very likely to be a citizen tester too, because nobody else is testing their app for them. ” Citizen developer dogfood He’s right of course, the citizen developer is (in most scenarios unless he or she has some really good friends) the only one likely to be prepared to eat their own dogfood and working with what might be a quite experimental and clunky application. As long as the citizen developer is the only user, too, things are pretty straightforward.

They will notice when the application breaks and so (hopefully) fix it. No harm was done to other users and, hopefully, but not certainly, there were no incorrect or harmful transactions executed and so no loss of data has occurred. Things get more complicated when the citizen developer’s app is being used by other people, or will otherwise impact their lives.

“Citizen testing can be (and, in actuality, really should be) an organized activity, too. Many businesses organize testing of new software releases so that the employees that will be using the application will conduct an activity known as User Acceptance Testing or UAT. In SAP deployments, for example, this practice is more like a rule than an exception,” explained Hannula.

A testing methodology & mindset Why is any of this important? Because, he says, as we bring citizen testers into the fold, an organization should remember that a successful tester needs to understand how to design tests that are likely to detect errors – and this kind of tester possesses two specific assets and attributes: testing methodology and tester’s mindset. Hannula also reminds us that it is also of great value if the tester understands the application (in terms of its nature, purpose and function) and technology domains (the platforms it will be run on, the device form factors it will be used on, the database backbone and cloud service it will rely upon and so on) in use, too. “When you ask a normal human being to test something, they’ll more generally figure out how it works, how to accomplish tasks with it and form an opinion about whether they like it or not.

A tester’s mindset is very different: they will figure out how it is supposed to work and then try all kinds of things to prove it doesn’t work that way,” he said. Speaking from experience gained at Copado in precisely this space, Hannula insists that to remain productive, the tester needs to be able to automate the tests they designed. “Being a manual and repetitive activity, test execution is a good candidate for automation.

Modern test automation tools are no-code: a citizen tester can automate tests without any coding skills. But just like the most wonderful text editor cannot turn a random person into a great novelist, the most wonderful testing tool cannot turn a random person into a great tester. Once again we come back to the fact that great testing needs a testing methodology and a tester’s mindset to be in place and exist,” said Hannula.

Citizen testers, we need you Testing purists (and, in fairness, Copado has a few of them) argue the Pareto principle and suggest that less than 20% of professional software developers possess a tester’s mindset. Going further, even fewer of them have learnt any testing methodologies. This means, if we follow the logic, there’s more than 80% probability that a professional software developer is a citizen tester, too.

There is perhaps no clearer validation for layperson users to join the software engineering ranks and start being citizen testers in a more formalized fashion. You’re already a citizen tester, please sort out your methodology and mindset. Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn .

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