Steve Watson has some thoughts about where the Testing Community should be concentrating its efforts in 2018: It’s the 1st of January 2018, and at 3pm the rain and grey skies have cleared, and a little blue sky and a few rays of sunshine appear. It’s that little ray of hope in an otherwise grey […]
What are testers?
I’m often asked what I do for a living, and when I tell them I am a software tester I do wonder if they think it is an easy job that any idiot can do. Well, good testers are certainly not idiots and are an essential part of any software development team. I think I’m […]
I can count up to 8!
I really liked this article about performance metrics. These kind of charts can be used to justify just about anything, and there are plenty of managers that spend so much of their time measuring rather than listening to their staff. Still. I do quite like a whizzy chart… Do you produce loads of whizzy hard […]
How I interview Testers… – Dan Ashby
This blog post is related to an excellent webinar by Dan Ashby for the Ministry of Testing. Want to hire great testers? Have a read of this. I’ve been conducting a lot of interviews recently and I thought I’d share my format for asking questions and stemming conversations that works well for me to be able to […]
Mapping biases
One of my favourite aspects of systems thinking was the consideration of thinking traps. It brings into play all kinds of problems with the way that humans consider information, and why we often grab the wrong end of a stick (the shitty end, usually). Maaike Brinkhof has written a very nice blog post about mapping biases […]
Using Selenium
There’s an increasing need to use automation to assist with our testing. We are about to launch into developing a huge, new system that interacts with all sorts of existing systems. This is an off-the-shelf application (which will require limited testing itself) which is to replace some existing systems, expand the capability of current users […]
Rosie needs your help
I am a tester. I test software for a living, but I inevitably can’t help but test just about everything that comes my way. I wonder how things work – or, more likely, wonder why something was made that way. I internally correct other people’s grammar (even though mine isn’t exactly perfect) and get quite […]
We have Jira. Now what?
We have Jira at work, and HP ALM. I quite like the former while utterly detesting the latter. We have quite a few, varied projects and our developers prefer Jira for their task management & defect needs, but Jira lacks a feature for the creation of test cases & tracking of related metrics. I am […]
#NottsTest – January 2016
I have been going to the monthly #NottsTest meetups for a number of years, and they are always informative. We meet on the first Wednesday of each month – usually at the amazing Capital One software studio – where we have a couple of speakers, free beer and pizza, and a nice chat with fellow […]
What motivates you?
I’ve been attending the Nottingham Agile meetups over the last year. They’ve all been excellent, with loads of good presentations aimed at making us better software developers. Last night’s meetup was about Scrum Masters (and how to be a great one). The talk – by the always helpful and insightful Chris RF – included an amazing […]
LeadingAnswers: Leadership and Agile Project Management Blog: Big Agile, the Route Less Travelled
Agile methods have been found to be extremely effective when used correctly. A reasonable reaction to witnessing any great performance in an organization is to demand more of it. So a tremendous amount of time, effort and resources have been expended over the last few years on scaling agile for the enterprise with all the […]
Complexity
Complexity, originally uploaded by rutty. 7/365 I’m a software tester. I didn’t realise this until about seven or eight years into my testing career – my role was a bit of a hybrid of job types – but for over ten years I have tested software, both application software and embedded. I love it, […]