Have you ever danced with the tester by the pale moon light?
Have you ever danced with the tester by the pale moon light?
Tuesday 13 July 2010 - Moved blog
For some reason my last couple of blog posts have disappeared? Including the one that mentioned that I've moved my blog to: http://dancedwiththetester.blogspot.com/
Monday 26 April 2010 - London Tester Gathering - 12th May - LVPO Bar
London Tester
Gathering - 12th May - LVPO Bar
Hello All,
The next LTG is
on the 12th May 2010 and will be at: LVPO Bar in Soho. 50 Dean Street
London, W1D 5BQ 020 7255 8617 http://www.lvpo.co.uk/location/ Closest tubes are:
Leicester Sq and Piccadilly Circus
Happy Hour is from 5pm-8pm.
The
plan: I'll be there from about 5:30pm and we have the basement room
booked until 10pm.
Currently no sponsor, if you're interested in
sponsoring then let me know.
On Saturday (27th March) I went to a RapidFTR CodeJam.
RapidFTR is Rapid Family Tracing and Reunification. It has been created
in order to help rescue agencies looking after kids in disaster areas.
It'll store personal and medical details which will help children get proper
medical attention and reunite them with their family but also just as
importantly help keep them safe from human traffickers.
Its a good cause and if you can spare some of your time then please have a
look for more details here: http://wwww.rapidftr.com.
I was of course late and so missed the meet n greet but it was a pretty good
turn out which is great. It must have been 20(ish) people in London and a couple of guys in New York with who we were video
conferencing.
For a lot of people the majority of the day was spent on environment
setup. I had real trouble getting it setup on my Ubuntu netbook and it in
fact took all day.
Lessons learnt from the environment setup:
1. If you are tired don't leave it until 12:30am to setup your environment then
stop halfway through because the setup guide is not quite working for your
version of Linux.
2. If you are going to a CodeJam the next day do not install a theme on your
netbook at 1am, get it half working then go to bed. It'll cause you performance
issues the next day.
3. Prepare a VM to use for your environment setup; it'll make life much easier.
4. Just because there is a guide for a Linux environment setup don't assume
it's been tried with different versions of Linux.
5. Keep a note of the steps you tried during the setup so that when you do get
it working you can write a guide for other people.
Silly things really, I should have known better.
The Devs worked in pairs working in 25min increments, took a 5min break then
worked another 25 then a 5 min break, it seemed to work well.
Although the environment setup was tricky it was good to hear different people,
strangers really, working together in pairs on their stories. A few
stories were actually completed which is great.
I was absolutely useless that day as it took me forever to get up and
running. I aim to be able to add some value as the project progresses
though by brushing up on my Ruby so I can help with the code and with testing.
The idea of the testers/QAs floating about helping people with their tests was
put forward but I felt this might distract if the Devs were in flow.
Details about development are here: http://www.rapidftr.com/developer
I aim to knock up a setup guide for Ubuntu over the next few days to make the process
quicker.
It's a good way (as cheesy as this sounds) to help make the world a better
place, brush up on your skillset and meet and work with new people.
Friday 26 March 2010 - London Tester Gathering - 14th April - LVPO Bar - Sponsored by Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and Electromind.
London Tester Gathering - 14th April - LVPO Bar - Sponsored by Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and Electromind.
Hello All,
We have a venue for the next London Tester Gathering: LVPO Bar in Soho. 50 Dean Street London, W1D 5BQ 020 7255 8617 http://www.lvpo.co.uk Closest tubes are: Leicester Sq and Piccadilly Circus
Happy Hour is from 5pm-8pm. Half price wine and cocktails, bottles of beer are £2.50.
The plan:
I'll be there from about 5:30pm and we have the basement room booked until 10pm.
Wednesday 24 March 2010 - Skate-a-thon to raise money for Shelterbox
My wife is taking part in a
skate-a-thon to raise money for Shelterbox, if youre able to help out please
sponsor her:
Hello
all,
I will be taking part in
Skaiti for Haiti - a 24 hour sponsored
skate-a-thon on April 10-11th. Proceeds will go to Shelterbox, a disaster relief
charity, which provides aid not just to Haiti but to any area that has been
affected by disaster.
Saturday 6 February 2010 - 2010 Test Management Summit - 26/27th January 2010
the Test Management Forum is happening in a few weeks and reminded me that I still had this unfinished blog post sitting in my drafts folder, so I finished it and here it is.
Recently, I was fortunate enough to attend the 2010 Test Management Summit details of which can be found on the UKTMF site. It was spread over two days and you could go to either one of or both of the days. On the first there were workshops in the morning and afternoon and on the second was the summit. I went to both days.
On the first day I attended Alan Richardson's (Compendium Developments Ltd.) 'Exploratory and Innovative Testing Workshop' and Dave Evans and Mike Scott's (SQS) 'Agile Test Management Workshop'. Alan covered definitions of exploratory testing and innovative, looked at ways Test Managers could help increase creativity and therefore innovation, talked about Heuristics & Mnemonics, risk, etc. We also had a few pratical excerises to get through.
There was a lot of discussion which was great and one thing that struck me was that a lot of Test Managers seemed to get dictated how the testing was going to be done in their organisation. **I had a lot more to say on this but it started getting too long so I thought I'd make it a blog post of it's own.**
I enjoyed Dave and Mike's session as well which was essentially a Q&A session on Agile Management.
They are both knowledgeable and have worked on various projects and if you are able to have a chat with them do so, you'll enjoy it and get some value out of it.
With Dave and Mike leading the discussions and input from various others in the room it was an interesting and worthwhile session.
The day ended with a few beverages and discussions and was a pleasant, entertaining and educational day.
The following day was a whole other matter!! I joke, the following day was just as good.
I attended Rob Lambert's (Social Tester) 'Agile is a mindset, not a methodology' talk where he discussed....well, Agile being a mindset and not a methodology. "It's about getting things done the best way, not a set way. It's about adopting a new way of thinking, placing the power back with the people that need it, the team." Totally agree with everything he said, some people and some organisations will not be able to work in an actually environment. Purely and simply put, it's not for everybody.
I also went to Ray Arell's 'Intel USA: Case Study - Moving to an Agile Environment' talk which was really good for anybody looking to move to Agile. He spoke about the trials and tribulations he faced and went through while moving his team at Intel to Agile.
Then there was Paul, Paul Gerrard's (Gerrard Consulting) 'Innovative Testing Practices' talk. I must admit, I was expecting Paul to talk about his experiences with cloud, crowd, etc.
However he talked about them as exciting prospects which need to be looked into, which is fair enough, they are. People are already using them though which is why I thought Paul would talk about what he has been doing. It was a good talk and there was discussion on how and what people are currently using.
Wednesday 3 February 2010 - London Tester Gathering - Wednesday 17th February 2010 - LVPO Bar
Hello All,
We have a venue for the next London Tester Gathering: LVPO Bar in Soho. 50 Dean Street London, W1D 5BQ 020 7255 8617 http://www.lvpo.co.uk/location/ Closest tubes are: Leicester Sq and Piccadilly Circus
We also have speakers/presenters: Jeremy Gidlow (Intechnica)- speaking (I believe) about various performance tools (pros and cons) and experiences with them David Evans & Mike Scott - TDD and Testify: http://code.google.com/p/testifywizard/
We just need the people, which the following information along with the chance to hear the speakers and meet people should cover: Happy Hour is from 5pm-8pm. Half price wine and cocktails, bottles of beer are £2.50.
The plan: I'll be there from about 5:30pm and we have a private room (with bar) booked from 6-7:30 for the speakers and then we have a private area in the main bar.
On the 12th Jan 2010 we held a London Tester Gathering, it was quite successful, we had around 20 participants. It was held at the Grosvenor Gloucester Casino where the staff were very helpful and friendly. Thanks must be given to Stephen Allott for organising the venue. In the past these have been purely social events, a chance to meet or catch up with people in testing. This time we offered the opportunity to speak and I'm glad to say we had some takers. We had: Stephen Allott John Reber Paul Gerrard Tom Gilb
Unfortunately Steve had lost his voice so instead of speaking about 'The Testing Community' he printed out some details.
John spoke about ownership of automated test tools in a TDD environment, he discussed the 'TDD's', his experiences and touched briefly on tools. It was a good talk and generated some discussion which was excellent.
Paul introduced the first equation of testing, quantum testing theory and testing uncertainty principle. He also spoke about the Test Management Summit. If you haven't already got your spot booked, get in now. And gave away copies of The Tester Pocketbook of which you should own a copy if you don't already. This was also a good talk and generated some discussion.
I might be the only person ever to have Tom Gilb at an event and have a short talk from him. This is not any kind of good achievement and one hopefully he'll give me a chance to rectify at another gathering. I wasn't aware Tom had a prior engagement to get to and the other talks over ran (which is not a bad thing) so we had a short talk from talk about his Lean QA course which is being run with TSG.
This was unfortunate as I've yet to hear Tom speak, something I hope to rectify as well.
Lessons learned:
Next time, limit it to two speakers and start it a little bit later, give everybody plenty of time to get there.
All in all it was a good night, people met, people talked. It was good enough to organise some more.
If you're interested in attending and/or speaking please join the 'London Tester Gathering' Linkedin Grp for details.
Thursday 14 January 2010 - What's wrong with me? Where were you brain? Frick I suck
I've noticed a fairly annoying trend to do with me and interviews and more specificially how if it's a job I really want I give an embarrassingly bad interview. I have had good interviews, brilliant interviews but when it's something I really really want for some reason, my brain says 'Nah, not happening, screeeeeeeeeeeeew you'. I had one of these recently. My mind went blank and I mean totally blank, if I'd been asked my address I would not have been able to give it. I believe at one point I may have actually been sitting there with my mouth open drooling on myself. It wasn't quite the image I was hoping for. I was embarrassed to be me and embarrased for the people trying to interview me as I responded with 'me......test......me test....eeeer....me tester' I think that I over think these things and I actually, for some stupid reason decided that it would be a good idea to re-read a book, learn a new tool, learn abit more about another tool, read up on a few other things, all within a couple of days ontop of normal work and life matters. It didn't work, everything went straight out of my head. After the interview I spent the rest of the day and night gritting my teeth and getting a stress headache. Yet on the way home, I stopped off to catch up with a mate and actually spent a little bit of time telling him about the new tool, everything that I couldn't remember in the interview, all the cool things this tool does, I could sit there and talk about it. 20minutes earlier, nothing, nada. So, I'm not somebody who you would want interview advice from but I'm going to give it anyway. If you have an interview, don't cram, you know your stuff, just let it come out naturally.
Thursday 7 January 2010 - Free course on Lean QA by Tom Gilb for the under employed
A second free course for the under employed, is now planned for 14-15th January, at TSG Liverpool St, on Lean QA. This is technical and aimed at test people who want to learn other QA approaches. Application to Tom Gilb (tomatgilbdotcom) with statements of employment status at that time.
http://www.gilb.com/tiki-download_file.php?fileId=288 test experience paper
http://www.box.net/shared/8oaggjt61k Real QA Tutorial Outline
(Put the links above in your browser to see details)
SEE TSG SITE FOR SYLLABUS OR Look at the attached document about the one day tutorial given at Unicom & the Real QA manifesto on which this two-day course is based.
I enjoyed the workshop and learnt a few things to get me started with Selenium. This is pretty much what I was looking for.
Anand Ramdeo of Atlantis Software (and of www.testinggeek.com) ran the workshop. The first hour was intros and covering the history, uses, future of Selenium and a little bit on Automation in general. Why to automate, etc.
Initially although the history and etc was interesting, it dragged on a bit longer then I thought it would. I actually thought we could probably have done without this, or it and the intros should be kept to half an hour. I wanted to get to the dirt. I know why I would automate,I was there to learn about a specific tool.
However, after the day was over, I did feel like I'd taken a lot in, so I don't feel that I have lost out on anything. I would suggest though that possibly it would be better just to have some slides or links that could be sent to attendees before hand to cover this stuff and/or keep it to half an hour. That way we could have got straight into Selenium.
Anand is a fountain of knowledge and is quite obviously passionate about what he does and makes a great instructor, the pace was good and Anand explained things well.
I found that a lot of the first half was Anand talking and us listening, when he got to the stages of discussing Actions, Assertions etc it would have been better for him to actually demonstrate as he talked. We could have then followed along on our laptops.
More time doing, less just listening is better when it comes to learning as far as I'm concerned.
That's not to say we didn't work through a few exercises, we did, in the second half, but there's no reason we couldn't be following a demonstration while the basics were covered.
I also believe this course would work better if it was actually over a number of weeks, say 5 or 6 weeks in the evenings for a hour and a half. This way contractors could attending without losing a days pay (which was one of the reasons for a Saturday course) and could also attend with permies.
If it was over a number of weeks you could have a set exercise to work on, come back the following week, discuss, learn a bit more, go away with another exercise. This would be a lot more useful as a learning process.
After the course you'd have some practical experience along with a mentor who you've been able to discuss things with.
Although the content was spot on for me: basically talked about Selenium, how it worked, covering IDE, RC and others, created a few test cases and went away with course material to continue learning. It was a intro or beginners course.
I'm not sure how somebody who already uses (I don't) Selenium or has used Selenium would feel, I think it would actually probably be better to have a Novice, Intermediate and Advanced course.
All in all I enjoyed the course, got what I wanted out of it and will be back for more.
I however would also suggest to pick a name and stick with it, I've seen the course posted around with different names, could get confusing.
Friday 4 December 2009 - First (London) Agile Testing Meetup Group meet took place
The First (London) Agile Testing Meetup Group meet took place yesterday. Nathan Bain is the group organiser and spoke last night. Skillsmatter hosted the meetup. I believe the video will be placed on the Skillsmatter site over the next few days and Nathan will be putting notes up on the Meetup site.
Nathan introduced himself and spoke about why he created the group which was essentially that he felt developers were good at these kinds of get togethers, testers....not so much.
I happen to agree and so thought the meetup group was a great idea.
As it was a first meetup things like what we want to get from it, how things will work going forward etc were discussed and will continue to be discussed over Twitter and GoogleWave. Things like book clubs, flash mob testing were mentioned.
Nathan also gave a quick demo of a few tools, Fitnesse and Selenium and we also got together in groups to discuss issues in Agile testing which were then listed to be discussed over the next month for the next meeting.
As I've found at other Agile events and as some of the others attending mentioned a lot of the issues mentioned were general development issues rather than specifically Agile Testing but if the group can help then great.
Also mentioned were things that were going on in the testing world such as Weekend Testers.
Before you knew it, the 8pm finish time was reached, which was probably a good thing as my stomach was growling angrily and I was near the podcast recording mic. I actually seriously think, depending how sensitive the mic is, my stomach might be on the podcast.
I vote at the next meetup we all chip in a fiver and get some pizza or something in.
All taken into consideration I think it was a great success, I met some people, had a demo of a few tools, spoke about common problems and possibly had my hungry stomach noises recorded 'on film'. What more could you ask for at a first meeting?
Monday 16 November 2009 - The first Agile Testing Meetup Group is happening in a few weeks
The first Agile Testing Meetup Group is happening in a few weeks, following is a post by Nathan Bain with the details, saves me some typing.
Agile Testing Meetup Group - first meetup on 3rd December 2009
Hello Agile & Scrum practitioners,
I am pleased to announce the first Agile Testing group meetup which will take place at Skills Matter on 3rd December 2009!
The event will feature live demonstration and getting started guide of one or more Agile Testing tools, following which everyone will have a chance to ask and answer questions on Agile Testing tools and practices.
We will also be discussing hot topics of the Agile Testing community, and hopefully finding solutions to each others problems and offering advice on good Agile Testing practices.
Thursday 12 November 2009 - New testing service.......
On Linkedin a question was asked about the availability of ISEB Intermediate exam sample questions.
A reply was posted from somebody from this organisation stating they had sample questions, I was curious so I checked out their website. I saw a little advert which I felt the need to share, I've removed the organisation name.
Thursday 29 October 2009 - The Software Testing Club is expanding, want to contribute?
I would go into details about the what is happening over at the STC but Joe and Phil have already done so.
If you are interested in writing about software testing then why not contribute an article to the Software Testing Club's (STC) new magazine due to be published in January 2010. The STC are inviting anyone in the software testing community to submit articles for review on any testing subject you want to write about. The STC are accepting articles from anyone working in the testing industry with a testing story to tell. Experienced writers are welcome just as junior testers are. So if you have something to say, post it to the following address: rob@softwaretestingclub.com. Visit http://www.softwaretestingclub.com/forum/topics/do-you-want-to-help... for more detailed information regarding your submission.
Wednesday 21 October 2009 - 'Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams' a good book and a good work out.
Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams so far a good book, only upto chapter 4 so I'll review once I've finished. It is however 576 pages and just a little too big and heavy for the commute to and from work. This morning I thought, 'Know what? I'm strong, I'm in shape, well, I'm round which is still a shape! It's justs a book, lets jam it into my laptop bag'. I am man, hear me roar, with a backpack too big to ignore........my back hurts.
Monday 28 September 2009 - "Skilled" tester - do you know what it is?
Gil Bloom posted the following question on linkedin: "Skilled" tester - do you know what it is? Is there a definition or a way to define it? Apparently it is not that obvious. I was challenged during a discussion with a (known) expert to define or explain what is a "skilled" tester. According to him, most of us don't know how to do it and rely on certifications, which (to his view) are worthless. So, who is a "professional" or "skilled" tester? Is it to do with work experience? Academic knowledge? Certifications? Combination of them? Should we link it to a specific project/job and only then answer it? I thought to open it to an online discussion, seeing how interesting it was for those who participated so far offline.
It's in the 'Software Testing & Quality Assurance' group.
My comment following:
I don't quite agree with your expert that certification is worthless however I will say that being certified does not make you a tester, either skilled or unskilled. It just means you can memorise sections of a book. Certification should hopefully give you fuel to continue your own experience, development and learning to become a skilled or unskilled tester. Some people will continue down that path regardless of Certification. Getting a driving licence doesn't mean you are automatically a good driver, doesn't mean you are bad either but for most people more time on the road will make them better. I think being a skilled tester comes down to natural ability, experience and a want/need to develop yourself. You have to be a questioner however you also have to ask the right questions, and so have to learn what questions need asking and when and also when the answers need questioning. And yes, some different projects/jobs require different skills, some will be transferable of course, it depends on the tester and the project/job. The skills should probably be defined though as different testers have different testing skills, technical skills and soft skills. This doesn't just count for testers though, it's the same for all jobs. Take two lawyers with the same education and similar experience will they be the same? Probably not, it'll come down to natural ability, what they've actually done with their experience and their own skillset. I think that defining what a (general) skilled tester is near impossible as there are too many variables stemming from what you actually need from the tester. That's a lot of writing, I haven't even had a coffee yet! Later I'll probably re-read what I wrote and decide to change it.
