Hiccupps

Just past the seven-year anniversary of Hiccupps, and taking stock once more, I find that I averaged around a post a week over the last 12 months. 50 posts a year  was my target when I started the blog back in 2011 and initially it was motivational: I'd find out if blogging could suit me, and me it, only by blogging, and I was prepared to put aside time to gather that data for a year. You can judge whether I suit blogging (for your needs, at this time, naturally) but my judgement (for myself, over the years) is that writing this blog suits me. I've retained the loose goal of weekly postings not because there's anything intrinsically positive about that volume of material, nor because it guarantees anything about the content, but because it continues to stimulate me to find a time box to write in and writing regularly brings me better writing, deeper thinking, and happiness. In these annual retrospective posts I've generally plucked out a few pieces that brought...

It's become an annual tradition in our team to run a Testing Can Be Fun session at Christmas. In them, we'll do a group activity that exercises our testing muscles in a context outside of our usual work, have a laugh, and eat something sweet. The first one was back in 2009 and saw us evaluating panettone, stollen, and mince pies as candidates for integration with our forthcoming Christmas Dinner product (or some other thin pretext to scarf multiple portions of cake) and it just carried on. Why Testing Can Be Fun ? To be honest, this far away in time, I forget why I chose the name. I mean, no-one's saying we don't have fun the rest of the year. At least, not to my face... Aaaaaanyway, last week we got together with a big box of traditional British Christmas biscuits and Decrypto . It's a team game where the objective is to communicate codes securely to your team mates and to intercept and decrypt the codes transmitted by the opposing team. Although it s...

UKSTAR are running their Meetup Hero competition again this year and I nominated Karo Stoltzenburg  with this somewhat embarrassing gush: Cambridge has had a really active tester community in the last few years: an evening meetup , a Software Testing Clinic , the Cambridge Exploratory Workshop on Testing and a morning Lean Coffee. Karo runs the first two, has been ever-present at CEWT and a regular at Lean Coffee. And, in case that wasn't enough, in our team at work she's initiated a book club, a series of "What I don't know about X" sharing sessions, and brought in guests to speak at Team Eating, our brown bag lunches. Pretty much, if there's something happening with testers in Cambridge you can expect to find Karo there. At the evening meetup she's given local testers the chance to be inspired by great speakers such as Anne-Marie Charrett, Adam Knight, and Neil Studd; to practice speaking in front of a friendly audience; to share testing stories ...