Hiccupps

This month's  Lean Coffee  was hosted by  DisplayLink . Here's some brief, aggregated comments and questions on topics covered by the group I was in. Are testers doing less and less testing? The questioner is finding that testers today are doing more "other" activities, than he was in his early days of testing. Where's the right balance between testing and other stuff? What's your definition of testing? I think that exploring ideas is testing. I fall into a "support" role for the team; I'm the "glue" in the team, often. I focus on the big picture. I am thinking about what needs to be ready for the next phase, and preparing it. I am thinking about information gathering and communication to stakeholders. Is there a contradiction: testers are a scarce resource, but they're the ones doing "non-core" activities. Perhaps it's not a contradiction? Perhaps testers are making themselves a scarce resource by d...

Last weekend, one of the testers from my team was speaking at Developer! Developer! Developer! East Anglia , a .NET community event. Naturally, because I'm a caring and supportive manager — and also as it was in Cambridge, and free — I went down to have a look. Despite not being a developer, it wasn't hard to find something of interest in all five sessions, although it's a shame the two talks on testing were scheduled against each other. Here's thumbnails from my notes. Building a better Web API architecture using CQRS (Joseph Woodward): Command Query Responsibility Segregation is a design pattern that promotes the separation of responsibility for reading data (query) from writing data (command). A useful intro to some concepts and terminology for me, it went deeper into the code than I generally need, and in a language and libraries that I'm unfamiliar with. I found  Martin Fowler's higher-level description from 2011  more consumable. I do like listenin...

Now where was I? Oh yes, The Organized Mind by erm ... hold on a minute ... it's on the tip of my tongue ... err ... ummm ... there you go:  The Organized Mind by Daniel Levitin , a self-subtitled guide to thinking straight in the age of information overload. And surely we all need a bit of that, eh? One of the most productive ways to get your mind organised, according to Levitin, is to stop trying to organise your mind (p. 35): The most fundamental principle of the organized mind, the one most critical to keeping us from forgetting or losing things, is to shift the burden of organizing from our brains to the external world ... This is not because of the limited capacity of our brains — rather it's because of the nature of memory storage and retrieval in our brains. Essentially, memory is unreliable. There are numerous reasons for this, including: novelty being prioritised over familiarity, successful recall being reliant on having a suitable cue, and — somewhat scaril...