The Model-Based Tester's Journey | Why Didn't You Test That?

00:00 - Introduction to guest Gunesh Patil, Senior Technical Lead at Ushur.

01:36 - Rich Jordan's and Gunesh Patil's background in model-based testing.

02:31 - Incremental approaches to testing.

04:07 - Trends of centralised automation teams have shifted.

06:59 - Reducing churn on translating business to use cases.

10:09 - Organisational drivers and technology need.

12:24 - Limited understanding and documentation of middleware creates a blackbox.

17:42 - Icecreams and volcanoes analogy related to services, tooling and working practices.

19:25 - Using impact analysis for scoping the knowledge gap.

24:20 - Avoiding technical debt.

28:15 - Striving for a regular expression rather than access to data.

29:16 - Encouraging predictable results through cooperation and knowledge sharing.

34:00 - Generating multiple automation scripts and stubs through model-based testing.

25:10 - The dynamics of a structured relationship with the SI.

40:00 - Showcase practitioner's contributions.

42:13 - Outro.

Welcome to episode 7 of the Why Didn’t You Test That? Podcast, hosted by Huw Price and Rich Jordan! In this episode, our hosts are joined by Gunesh Patil, Senior Technical Lead at Ushur, together, they discuss their model-based testing journeys!

Rich Jordan and Gunesh Patil had previously worked together on major projects, where they introduced model-based testing to manage transformational change of disparate systems in a medium-sized organisation. They championed DaveOps, Data Automation and Virtual Environments, for their organisation's version release and change management.

DaveOps helped spotlight how a shared understanding of a system’s architecture, or lack of, affects good software testing. Rich illustrates this as an anti-pattern, where automation teams were stepping in to help test teams run test cases in bulky end-to-ends. This was in response to automation test cases failing. A fail isn’t due to the automation but more to a lack of shared understanding of the consumable breakpoints in system’s architecture.

For stakeholders with short-term sights on improved automation, this omits the benefits of the ‘how you get there' approach of Model-Based Testing. For Gunesh, visual and flow based production of reusable components is actually a driving force in efficiency as the need for translating business requirements into test cases gets reduced.

Operationally, test matching, along with allocating data, formalises thinking whilst paying down technical debt. The main takeaway is that collective analysis makes software testing more integrated across teams, giving opportunity to create a successful delivery strategy thanks to model-based testing.