Hiccupps

This is a joint post with Claire Banks about a mentoring experiment we conducted for six months last year. We describe how it started, how we organised it, how it went, why we stopped, and how we feel about it now. Starting Claire : I’ve been testing for more years than I care to remember. I am one of many that ‘fell into testing’ around the time of the hyped Y2K bug . I have held a variety of roles from being a test team member through to manager at numerous different companies and industries over the last 19 years. Given this wealth of experience, why on earth would I want someone I can talk things through with and seek advice from? Surely I should know it all? Well, no. I don’t know it all and never will. Plus I have a confidence issue. At CEWT #4 I presented on why I would never be a test manager again. I reflected back on my career and was struck by the realisation that I’d had: 16 years in testing 12 different companies 25 test managers 3 great test manage...

The testers at Linguamatics decided to explore the adoption of a set of team values and this short series of posts describes how we got to them through  extended and open discussion. If you find the posts read like one of those "what I did in the holidays" essays you used to be forced to write at school then I'll have achieved my aim. I don't have a recipe to be followed here, only the story of what we did, in the order we did it, with a little commentary and hindsight. Introduction Why? Teasing Them Out Living With Them Reflection --00-- We took our own sweet time to  arrive at a set of team values . That's okay with me. It felt like a good pace for us given all of the variables: the ongoing work, the people, the novelty, and the uncertainty of the outcome. We took small steps, with space for review, with clarity on the next stage, and with consensus. We've now been living with our values for a few months and I thought it might be interest...

Respect can be earned in many ways, with reliability, consistency and longevity among them: say you'll do your thing, do your thing, improve your thing, repeat, repeat, repeat. And so respect is due to the organisers of the State of Testing survey for their continuing efforts to record annual snapshots of our industry. The 2019 survey is open now and results from the previous five iterations are still available. Image:  https://flic.kr/p/auDHZX

The testers at Linguamatics decided to explore the adoption of a set of team values and this short series of posts describes how we got to them through  extended and open discussion. If you find the posts read like one of those "what I did in the holidays" essays you used to be forced to write at school then I'll have achieved my aim. I don't have a recipe to be followed here, only the story of what we did, in the order we did it, with a little commentary and hindsight. Introduction Why? Teasing Them Out Living With Them Reflection --00-- Having got to a longlist of seven values that we were struggling to cut down further , we decided to live with them for a while and then see how we felt. I made small cards listing the values and short descriptions and distributed them to the team. I also made the values prominent on our team's pages in the company wiki and wrote about our exper...