Michael Morlo

Background

About Michael Morlo

After nearly 25 years of Test Management in very large projects, I can say: Forget about test management, forget about test reporting, and, especially, forget about the idea that testing software after having it developed increases its quality. For me, now, strictly following 2x3 sentences, would do the job much better: THE LIGHTHOUSE SENTENCES Know your customer! This does not only mean to build prototypes and performing UI-Testing as early as possible. It also means to establish a really good business monitoring of your application and your system and your hardware. Only such a "more-than-technical" monitoring enables you to increase the quality of your whole IT - for your customer, not for you! Make your requirements as short as possible! Most quality problems result from too much complexity. Complexity cannot be reduced, but you can structure it differently, e.g, by shorten each requirement and increase their number. Strictly following the idea of a Minimal Viable Product helps you enormously to structure and handle complexity instead of getting lost in much too detailed requirements, code lines, test cases, and production problems. Simply because you deal with small problems. One after the other, each one learning from its predecessors. Perfection at day one is not good enough! Make your agile team as independent as possible! If your architecture does not allow that, build a better one. If that is not possible, invest in a testing architecture that allows indepedent DevOps. Instead, do not invest in complex end-to-end testing that, at the very end, may help you feeling good, but does not increase a bit the quality of the product. And, please, give your teams the ability and the responsibility to do, what they think is best for their product! THE THREE PRINCIPLES OF QUALITY Do everything together! Each and every deliverable should be reviewed or, better, worked on in a team. Increased costs are more than levelled by its increased quality. Document clever! Each and every deliverable should be documented in a way that a trained third party could understand what was done. This will help you through all personal and technical changes of your and will help you to fulfill the main requirements of regulators. Any tool help here is more than useful! Measure your quality! Each and every deliverable should include metrics to measure its quality. Only by having such metrics, you will be able to increase quality as you otherwise even have no idea, how good was your work. Sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's tough. But every measurement will help.