Acknowledgement: My thanks to Lee Hawkins and Lisa Crispin for reviewing my blog before publishing. I really appreciate you providing the time to provide feedback on my writing. In my last blog Not everybody can test I noted the importance of being able to tell stories about your testing. If you want to people to … More Creating your story

It has been, of late, an interesting time to observe LinkedIn posts. Amongst the popular themes are  “manual testing” and “not everybody can test”. While the term “manual testing” annoys me, for the moment, I’m a little over that discussion. Let’s look at the “not everybody can test” proposition. I’m uncertain if I’m about to … More Not everybody can test

This blog was co-written with Lee Hawkins. You can find Lee’s blog posts at https://therockertester.wordpress.com/ . Lee can be found on Twitter @therockertester We recently read an article on the QA Revolution website, titled 7 Great Reasons to Write Detailed Test Cases, which claims to give “valid justification to write detailed test cases” and goes … More The case against detailed tests cases (part one)

In my most recent blog Value through simplicity I mentioned how it is possible to take small steps to influence quality and/or reduce complexity. In an “ideal world” you would be able to propose trying an idea and then run the experiment and feel safe the entire journey. Not all employers are an “ideal world” … More Testing in stealth mode

Testing is a complex activity that has intersections of technology, psychology, analysis and people management (amongst other skills – this in itself could be a blog). Before you get confused, people management, from my testing perspective is working with people and influencing, not being a gatekeeper to release or some similar activity. If we accept … More Value through Simplicity

Thursday was a busy day for me at work. Busy in good ways. I had picked up a small task for testing and in the process, along with a developer, spent the majority of the day finding issues. The best bit, at least in my view, was that my developer colleague was active finding bugs … More On reflection…….

Recently I spotted a job advertisement in LinkedIn and decided to tweet the advertisement. My commentary on the tweet “When are we going to stop seeing this in tester role ads. It’s way past time this was history. Good luck with ensuring error free.” The job ad I tweeted is shown below with any references … More The impossible and the ironic

This post is brought to you through conversations recent, and past. The more recent ones tending towards LinkedIn discussions and reading the thoughts of others. Something that stands out to me is that many testers struggle to explain what they do when they test, why they do those things and even why they test. I … More Testing – Not Just Bugs

I’ve been in IT for a bit over 20 years. In that time I’ve been a business analyst, a support desk lead and, for the most part, a tester. I’ve designed processes, I’ve redesigned processes, I’ve redesigned myself and my testing beliefs. When I first starting testing, as a dedicated tester, I was very much … More Agile Elitism – Undoing the Good

Note: This is another blog that has been sitting in my drafts folder for well over 12 months. I honestly don’t know why, maybe I just forgot it was there. I’m publishing this in the “as I found it” state with the exception of a couple of grammatical changes. I can still remember the people … More PBR/Grooming