This is a short preview of a talk I will giving at Agile Testing Days 2014 The rise of Distributed Version Control Systems with good merge support has rehabilitated Feature Branches with many Open Source projects (OSS) receiving contributions as Pull Requests. Feature Branching is a technique where developers do all their changes separate from the mainline of code. Next they open a Pull Request to have their code merged into the mainline after being peer reviewed. This OSS popularity for Pull requests with Git and Mercurial has been transferring to commercial projects, with many teams now adopting it internally. SCM is seen as a Developer centric domain but testers have a lot to gain. This presentation will cover an introduction to Pull Requests and demonstrate how to identify key information that can be used to as inputs to different testing techniques. While not a direct substitute for pairing with a developer, pull requests represent an opportunity to review the code, automated testing and learn from the developers by asking questions. As each Pull Request represents a single User Story this information can help limit the scope of Exploratory based testing sessions and be utilized to further understand the risk of the changes to the system.

1. Pull Requests and
Testing can be friends
Alan Parkinson
CEO, Hindsight Software
@alan_parkinson

2. Hindsight Software
a lean Start-up

4. Branching
master
branch
branch

6. Request to Merge
Code modifications
and the team
conversation
discussing them

7. Code Reviews are one of the
cheapest methods of finding
defects

8. Code Reviews are one of the cheapest
methods of finding defects

9. Anatomy of a
Pull Request

15. Ask Questions
to learn
the risks

16. Exploratory Testing

18. Any changes to Unit Tests?

19. Defects belong in the
conversation

20. Discuss usability

22. Pull Requests contain valuable
information to refine the scope of
Exploratory Testing

23. Build Quality In
Continuous Delivery and
DevOps Experience Reports
70% of author royalties to
Code Club
leanpub.com/buildqualityin
@buildqualityin

24. Questions?
@alan_parkinson

25. Pull Requests and
Testing can be friends
Alan Parkinson
CEO, Hindsight Software
@alan_parkinson