Atomic Talk Title: Risks with Ticket Driven Software Testing

Since February of 2020, Robert Sabourin performed over 100 task analysis assessments about software testing practices at many organizations implementing variations of “agile” development with Scrum-like or Scrum-inspired development frameworks. 

The organizations are in many different business domains including Enterprise Management Systems, Transactional Ecommerce Systems, Medical Information Management, Financial Services, and Insurance Industries. 

The common thread between these organizations was that software engineering activities were managed and tracked through ticket-oriented workflow management systems.

In the ticket-oriented workflow systems team members invariably received work assignments as tickets that were somehow assigned to them by other team members.

Team members would receive all their work instructions through the ticket management system.  If clarification was required a chain of questions was attached to the ticket.

Rob has observed and identified 12 important risks related to this approach.

In this presentation, Rob will share his findings and discuss the possible consequences of ticket-driven software testing.

Talk Takeaways

• Customers don’t buy tickets they buy products
• Testing tickets in isolation misses many important technical risks, especially cross-feature interference and resource sharing risks
• Ticket-driven models should support our work – our work should not be to support the ticket-driven model
• Do not lose sight of the fact that the model may be useful but is most certainly wrong – and at best is a gross simplification of how testing work can be organized