Hiccupps

This post is a conversation and a collaboration between Anders Dinsen and me. Aside from a little commentary at the top and edits to remove repetition and side topics, to add links, and to clarify, the content is as it came out in the moment, over the course of a couple of days. A question I asked about not looking for bugs at Lean Coffee in Cambridge last month initiated a fun discussion. The discussion suggested it’d be worth posing the question again in a tweet. The tweet in turn prompted a dialogue. Some of the dialogue happened on public Twitter , some via DM, and on Skype, and yet more in a Google doc, at first with staggered participation and then in a tight synchronous loop where we were simultaneously editing different parts of the same document, asking questions and answering them in a continuous flow. It was at once exhilarating, educational and energising. The dialogue exposes some different perspectives on testing and we decided to put it together in...

When Karo asked whether it'd be OK if she nominated me along with Chris George and Neil Younger as meetup heroes for a UKSTAR competition I said I was sure we'd all be flattered. Know any Software Meetup Heroes? I nominated @chrisg0911 @norry_twitting @qahiccupps - with a heartfelt thanks! https://t.co/6q68WU4fW1 — karo. stoltzenburg (@karostol) December 14, 2016 I guess I didn't really expect it to go anywhere and I certainly didn't expect that I'd feel somewhat embarrassed if it did. But it has . And so there you go, I learned something about myself. Again. I've read the short-listed nominations and Emma, Oana, Alexandru, Leigh, Tony, and Hugh all look like great candidates doing great work for their local testing communities. I'd love you to go and read about them and vote for a hero right now. Except that as I write this, it looks like, with delightful irony, that might not be possible ... @qahiccupps there a bug in votin...

I came across this quote in Managing the Unmanageable , attributed to Doug Linder: A good programmer is someone who looks both ways before crossing a one-way street. It made me chuckle - churlishly, childishly - as I imagined a developer crossing testing off their list because each time they'd happened to cross the street they'd implemented they'd checked it was working. Well, perhaps that some aspect of it wasn't not working , at that time, for that person, etc etc. Reflecting as I write this, I wonder if I'd been having a bad day... Anyway, I offered the quote to the Test team at Linguamatics yesterday, along with mince pies, and posed a different question as part of our annual festive Testing Can be Fun session (see also The So in Absolute , Last Orders , Further Reading , Testing is Like Making Love ): What might a “good” tester say or do, when encountering a one-way street? Ten minutes allowed, and as many mince pies as you can eat. Stick your a...

This month's  Lean Coffee  was hosted by  Cambridge Consultants . Here's some brief, aggregated comments and questions  on topics covered by the group I was in. How to get work in testing having been a developer for 25 years? The questioner is an experienced developer/consultant who consistently sees "poor quality" development. You don't need a formal background; it's possible to learn testing on the job. The job market seems to be about 'technical testers' these days, so a developer could be suited to it. Are you applying for roles and being rejected. (Not yet; this is a recent idea.) What do you mean by testing? ("Separation of concerns, loose coupling, SOLID, good requirements. Unit testing is just there for the taking ... you just do it.") They sound like full life-cycle or architectural ideas that might enable testing or reduce the need for it? ("Yes.") Think about what motivates the person you're pitching to....

This week, Maaret Pyhäjärvi published How to write 180 blog posts in a year .  Maaret's blog is one that I make a point of reading whenever Feedly tells me there's a new post there. Why? Because her posts are thoughtful, often deeply thoughtful. Here's a couple of paragraphs from Thinking you're the best : For years, I prepared in the previous night for every relevant meeting. I went in with a ready-made plan, usually three to prep my responses for whatever might emerge in the meetings. Back in school, my Swedish teacher made me translate things out loud every class, because of my "word-perfect translations". Truth is I had them pre-translated with great effort because I was mortified with the idea of having to do  that work on the fly.  Through my own experiences, I've grown to learn that the pre-prep was always my safety blanket. I did not want to look bad. I did not want to be revealed. I was the person who would rather use 3 days on a half-an-ho...