Last week, I attended the Agile Testing Days in Berlin. I presented on Wednesday afternoon on how to self-educate yourself in Software Testing. I uploaded the slides to slideshare.
In early September I did a webinar on the same presentation. You can access and download the webinar at the EuroSTAR pages.
Rob Lambert put up the final chapter from The Deliberate Tester. In the eighth chapter, Peter’s boss asks him to get onto his first project. He immediately starts to certify everyone, … oh no, he makes some suggestions to the customer on how to test their application.
It has been quite some work to write this throughout the year, but it has been great fun. I don’t think I will extend this series soon, as I currently feel like I have to limit my work-in-progress for writing. I hope you liked this nice little story. Thanks for reading.
Continuing the series of questions from the CONQUEST 2010 conference two weeks back, we’ll take a closer look on questions regarding standards and methods.
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Today in the “What you always wanted to know about Testing and Quality Assurance” I will answer questions from the outsourcing category. Since this is a hot topic for me, I hope not to rant too much at it, but let’s see.
Continuing the What you always wanted to know about Testing and Quality Assurance series, we will take a closer on Agile Test Management today. Please note that I consider the term Agile Test Management to be an oxymoron. The team is self-managing in Agile, and there is no dedicated manager role to grant the team enough power to manage itself. This surely needs lots of trust – especially when transitioning from a more traditional environment. but is essential to any team effort.
Last week I attended the CONQUEST 2010 conference. As I was invited to be part of an experts panel, I answered some questions from the conference attendees about testing, quality, and how all of this works. In particular I was invited as an expert on Agile testing. The session was voice recorded, in order for the transcript to be provided online in a few weeks. Since it will be on German and we had to restrict our answers to two minutes, I asked the organizers, Karin Vosseberg and Andreas Spillner, whether I may translate the questions to English and publish them on my blog, and got the permission to do so. So, this is the first set of questions (from the CONQUEST 2010 attendees) and answers (from myself). The first set of questions is filed under the topic “Testing as a profession”.
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The Software Testing Club put up the seventh episode from my mini-series The Deliberate Tester. In the seventh episode Peter joins a Testing Dojo at a Lunch & Learn and gets to know how to learn collaboratively on a testing team.
Some while ago, J.B. Rainsberger posted a case for slack, and that you might be sabotaging your peoples training. I think it was Kent Beck who pointed me to the self-similarity of nature in eXtreme programming explained. In this post I’m going to take a closer look on how we learn, and how nature is self-similar in this regard, and what we may derive from this.
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This has been on my mind for quite some time. During the past week I read three blog entries which reminded me to write this down. First of all there was Vesna Leonard who wrote that she was not like any other qa or tester that her colleagues had met. Second, Lanette Creamer wrote a tale of two testers. Finally Alan Page blogged about the Tester DNA. Having referenced my inspirations, let’s take a look on things that us testers do, but should stop doing, and most importantly why.
Two weeks back, my niece was christened. During the ceremony the priest read the Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector. I was amazed to see parallels between management in software testing and a 2000 year old story. Here’s the story as I found it online by searching for it:
The Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector
To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else, Jesus told this parable: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood up and prayed abouta himself: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’
“But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’
“I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”
(see Luke 18)
Now, the priest explained how God would look at both of them. In fact, the Pharisee tells all what he has achieved and how disciplined he is about his religion. He uses 31 words to describe that he is superior to some other folks, and names a few, even referencing the tax collector as a bad example. On the other hand, the tax collector knows his wrong steps, and asks for mercy in barely 6 words.
The priest continued that God could judge the prayers from both based on the number of words they used to reach him. Clearly, the Pharisee looks better here, as he has the larger number of words, 31, as opposed to the 6 words from the tax collector. But instead, we get told, that God rather takes a look on the one who knows about his failings, and simply asks for forgiveness. Wonderful.
That was when I started to wonder whether God would be counting lines of code or test cases…