This is the third part of a series of blog entries on a gift I got from Matt Heusser. Today, I’m heading for the first actual games.
Continue reading A Christmas gift from a tester for a tester – Part ThreeA Christmas gift from a tester for a tester – Part Two
This is the second part of a series of blog entries on a gift I got from Matt Heusser. Today, I’m heading for touring the product.
Continue reading A Christmas gift from a tester for a tester – Part TwoA Christmas gift from a tester for a tester – Part One
A while back I received a gift from Matt Heusser, my early mentor in the Miagi-Do school. It asked me to test it. So, I decided to make a series of blog entries over the holidays out of it. Today we will start with the most obvious thing: unpacking.
Test levels in Agile testing
In the past week Ulrich Freyer-Hirtz on the Agile Testing mailing list asked about different testing levels in an Agile project. He found the definition of unit, component, and acceptance tests appropriate based on several books. This discussion reminded me about the ambiguity that we face today in terms of testing. There have been several renaming attempts in the past few years. For example Dale Emery refers to a blog entry from 2004. Gojko Adzic made a similar renaming attempt. Let’s take a step back, and see what all those names really want to tell us. Afterwards we will be able to make a more informed decision about names.
Continue reading Test levels in Agile testingAlternative Paths to Certification
I received quite some feedback on my last blog entry on certification. One of the feedbacks made me wonder what an alternative to certification is. This question struck me hard enough to write a follow-up on that. I think this question can be answered solely in a certain context. I’ll try to answer it under several contexts, one by one.
Continue reading Alternative Paths to CertificationCertification
On the Agile testing mailing list there is currently a discussion on-going about the value of certifications and certificates. I have a strong opinion on it, and I would like to provide them on my blog. The basis has been the upcoming Certifiaction program for Agile testers. I have provided my critics to their courses as far as I could. I admire the efforts people put in such courses. That said, I don’t intend to offend anyone involved in certification programs, and will try to raise my objections as constructive as possible. But I also know that I will fail from time to time.
Continue reading CertificationAgile makes the problem transparent
When my colleagues or myself teach Agile classes, we often refer the ability of Scrum or Kanban making the problem transparent. The teams still have to react appropriately upon it. This also holds true for testing in Agile projects. Motivated from the discussions at the German Agile Testing and Exploratory workshop, I ended up with a realization, that not only Agile testers profit from soft skills and collaboration with programmers.
Continue reading Agile makes the problem transparentLessons from complexity thinking
While Diana Larsen was in Germany in July she spoke about a course she was currently taking called Human Systems Dynamics. Since then some of my colleagues started to dive into it. So did I. I didn’t take the course, but decided to go for some of the books on it. The first one I came across is called Facilitating Organization Change – Lessons from complexity science, and deals with a lot of stuff on complexity science, self-organization, and how to introduce changes in a complex adaptive system (CAS). These are some of my first thoughts after finishing the book.
Continue reading Lessons from complexity thinkingI don’t want to be called QA anymore!
This is the title of a talk I submitted to two conferences this year. At one it made it into the program: the Agile Testing Days in Potsdam. It’s a pity that I got sick over the weekend, so I won’t give that talk. Anyways, I thought people might be interested in the talk, so I wanted to share some thoughts on my blog about it.
Continue reading I don’t want to be called QA anymore!Computer Programming Fundamentals
Today, I finished reading a rather old book. It was published in 1961. It’s about computer programming. So, what can you learn from a 50 year old book? While reading it, I got in touch with one of its authors, Jerry Weinberg. He seemed pretty astonished that even after 50 years someone was still reading one of his earlier works. Besides the fact that the book Computer Programming Fundamentals by Leeds and Weinberg was one of the first books to mention software testing at all, I got many more nuggets of wisdom out of it – astoundingly still valid, even half a century later. I decided to share my insights with others.
Continue reading Computer Programming Fundamentals