On October 28, 2014 I visited Sogeti’s TMap Day.
This year’s focus was on their new book “Neil’s Quest for Quality”,
subtitled “A TMap© HD Story”.

This blog post describes my first impressions of that day.  When I have read the book I will either return to this post and adjust it or write a separate one on the books content.

Note: I have read the book and have adjusted the post.

The book is written as a novel. It contains “the TMap Human Driven story, consisting of a business novel, building blocks, Mr. Mikkel’s musings and contributions from the innovations board in testing”.

A quality-driven approach

The new TMap presents itself as a quality-driven approach that is captured in the TMap© Suite which consists of the following three parts:

1. TMap Next
2. TMap© HD
3. Building Block described in the TMap HD book and gathered, maintained and extended on http://www.tmap.net

Inspired on Lean, Agile and DevOps

Both authors explained their contribution to the book and expressed that the elements (more detail later) are mostly inspired on the market move towards Agile and DevOps and the whole is based on a Lean approach to software development.

Aldert Boersma, one of the authors, positioned quality-driven as follows.

The approach described in TMap HD© distinguishes five basic elements:

The (short) TMap HD descriptions for these concepts are:
People
Only people realize moving from “Testing according to TMap” to “Testing with TMap”.People with a broad knowledge of quality and testing that is.

Simplify
Make things as simple as possible – but not more simple than that.
Start small and work from there. A complicated process will only lose focus on the result.

Integrate
Integration with respect to testing denotes to a shared way of working, with a shared responsibility for quality. Testing is not a stand alone process.

Industrialize
Industrialization is important in improving testing and optimizing quality. Test tools are used to test more, more often, and faster.

Confidence
The goal of TMap HD© is providing confidence in IT solutions through a quality-driven approach. Confidence is the fifth element over and above all others.

Building Blocks

The first four elements should help you choose and apply building blocks that give (build) confidence. There is no prescribed set of blocks to use and main blocks themselves are seen as larger blocks of which smaller parts are chosen.

The now available building blocks are:

• Test manager
  In the Test manager presentation the remark was made that fewer people will be TM but the activities will remain
• Test manager in traditional
• Assignment
• Test organization
• Test plan
• Product risk analysis
  Oddly during the test management presentation and in the book this was called
  Product Risk & Benefit Analysis but that is not part of the website (yet)
• Test strategy
• Performance testing
• Test approaches
• Crowd-testing
• Test varieties
  This replaces the current Test Levels and Test Types.
  They are divided in Experience based and Coverage based
• Test manager in agile
• Permanent test organisation
• Model-based testing
• Quality policy
• Using test tools
• Quality-driven characteristics
• Integrated test organization
• Reviewing requirements

As a kind of closing motto for that morning the following phrase was handed as a summary for test managers “Do not report trouble but offer choices for the client”.

So…

The TMap Day and the book have left me with rather distinct, and slightly contradicting, impressions.

A move in the right direction

Sogeti has embraced the fact that software development and with it software testing has changed over the last decades. The rise of Agile and Lean on the one side and the decline of Waterfall hasn’t gone unnoticed and the new brand certainly addresses these developments. There is also an influence that Sogeti has carefully tried to avoid in mentioning but that I believe is clearly present. That influence is Context-Driven Testing. In spite of naming it environment, circumstance or situation TMap HD shares the principle that based on the context software testing is and should be different and use that what best suites the context.

Criticism

Ever since TMap, and TMap Next and particularly since their training and certification program appeared there has been a lot of criticism. This criticism especially focusses on the rigid factory school view on software and the limited value of TMap certification. While Sogeti itself did not react to this much many of the authors, most of them no longer working for Sogeti, did. The common denominator in their response was that the content was misunderstood and it was never meant to be followed by the letter.

Next to a wider interest for and influence of new software development approaches the emergence of building blocks shows that parts of the criticism is taken to heart and that TMap should and can now be used more flexible.

Superficial

In the Netherlands we have a saying “Oude wijn in nieuwe zakken” (litterally Old wine in new wineskins) expressing that although it looks new it’s still the same old stuff. I believe this applies also TMap HD. Even with influence of Agile and Lean and the introduction of Building Blocks in the book I am still left the feeling that beneath the surface the nature of the solutions is still the same as before. This feeling is enhanced by the fact that TMap Next is still declared to be the core of the testing approach and that all existing training courses and certificates remain. Especially that last part has led to the rigid and limited testing approach that many Dutch testers employ.

So while in theory there is hope for positive change I fear that in reality nothing much will change for the better.