Thursday, June 1, 2017

An upcoming side project for the test team


We voted this week to dedicate an upcoming sprint to focus on becoming more efficient as a team rather than focus on any given new functionality for Tableau.  The thinking here is that if we become 10% more efficient, we can deliver 10% more features in a given release over time, so this small investment now will pay large dividends in the future.

The test team chose to work on analyzing automation results.  For instance, if a given test is known to fail some large percentage of the time - let's say 99.99% for sake of argument - then if it fails tonight I might not need to make investigating it the highest priority task on my plate tomorrow.  Similarly, a test that has never failed and fails tonight might very well become my most important task tomorrow.

So what we are doing in our first steps is determining the failure rate of every single test we have.  Just tying together all that data - years worth, times several thousand tests, times multiple runs per day, et… - is a large challenge.  Then we have to mine the data for the reason for each failure.  If the failure was due to a product bug, then we need to factor out that failure from computing how often each test intermittently failed.

The data mining and computation for all of this seems like a good, achievable goal for one sprint.  Using that data in a meaningful way will be the (obvious) follow on project.

Wish us luck!

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,
John 

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