One of the things that testers in my classes on ATDD and Exploratory Testing struggle the most with is that programmers and testers appear to give up independence with this approach. My first reaction to this is often that I hear them asking to leave their testing silos in place, and start to convince them to collaborate more with the programmers. By hard I recently learned that the Helpful Model (“No matter how it looks, everyone is trying to be helpful.” Secrets of Consulting, page 101) and the Rule of Three Interpretations (“If I can’t think of at least three different interpretations of what I received, I haven’t thought enough about what it might mean.”, Quality Software Management Volume 2 First-order measurement, page 90) also applies to myself.
Continue reading On Programmer-Tester separationProblem-solving leadership May 2011
During the past week I had the pleasure to attend the Problem-solving Leadership course in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Johanna Rothman, Esther Derby, and Jerry Weinberg led through the course, generating some insights from their more than 100 years of professional experience. Here are some ideas I would like to share hoping to motivate some of my readers to attend the course as well – I heard there were some places in the August course left.
Continue reading Problem-solving leadership May 2011Second Writing about Testing conference in 2011
On May 13th and 14th I attended the second Writing About Testing peer conference in Durango, CO. Chris McMahon had been such a pleasant host. The overall theme was about new frontiers in testing. The atmosphere was very inspiring considering all the writing energy in the room as well as the terrain outside. Here are my impressions from the talks.
Continue reading Second Writing about Testing conference in 2011The tool vendor fallacy
Today I came across a blog entry on the need for programming expertise for test automation. I had the urge to reply. While doing so, I decided to put my reply up on my blog and call it the tool vendor fallacy. Just in case…
Continue reading The tool vendor fallacyAre you a member of … ?
In a forum on the Software Testing Club today someone asked a question whether I was a member of some testing organization. I put up a rather longish answer to that which I wanted to share on my blog as well.
Continue reading Are you a member of … ?Structured Exploratory Testing – an oxymoron?
Michael Bolton beat me on blogging about it. Though, I still want to throw in my pieces to the structure in Exploratory Testing debate. The source of the conversation was
On Twitter, Johan Jonasson reported today that he was about to attend a presentation called “Structured Testing vs Exploratory Testing”.
as Bolton writes. The implication of the talk is probably, that Exploratoy Testing and Structured Testing are opposite and mutually exclusive. Let’s see if this holds.
Continue reading Structured Exploratory Testing – an oxymoron?Management 3.0
Last week I was fortunate to attend Jurgen Appelo‘s class on Management 3.0 in Hamburg, Germany. When Matt Heusser hit me to Jurgen’s Top200 Blogs for Software Developers in 2009, I sensed that Mr. Appelo had a unique view on software development. Last year he finished his book on Management 3.0, and accompanying the course we got a free copy of it. While I had read the stuff from Weinberg on Management, one of my goals was to find out what management is. Though I couldn’t achieve this goal in Jurgen’s class, I got some nice and unexpected take-aways from the training.
Continue reading Management 3.0Questions to ask during Debriefs
The other day on twitter I asked
What questions do you ask during an Exploratory Testing session debriefing?
Since I didn’t any replies on this at all, I figured it’s time for me to come with some ideas on my own. Let others work doesn’t work on this one.
Continue reading Questions to ask during DebriefsInspectional Testing video
Following last week’s WeekNight Testing session, I recorded a video today using Inspectional Testing for FireFox 4. Here is the mindmap with the session and debrief notes that I took during the 10 minute session.
I uploaded the video to YouTube. I hope the video will still give you a hint what Inspectional Testing is about.
WeekNight Testing Live
Last Wednesday we had a WeekNight Testing session. There was something special about this session. It was announced as a live session. Mike Scott contacted me in February, asking whether I could organize a live session in Hamburg, while they were bringing in a gig at SkillsMatter in London. Earlier in March we got also a session organized in San Francisco by Lisa Crispin. So we ran the session in parallel in three different locations. Besides the official session report, here are some thoughts on how I ran the session in Hamburg.
Continue reading WeekNight Testing Live