Hiccupps

Last night I attended MiniCAST, an online version of the Association for Software Testing 's famous CAST conference. I've never been to CAST in person but I can say that the vibe here was great, much more informal and peer-based than the presenter-audience split I've seen elsewhere. It ran for four hours and squeezed in four talks on two tracks, several socialising sessions, and a keynote from Rachel Kibler . Rachel spoke about stress cases, those scenarios when context, or the product, or both in tandem distress the user. For example, the health-tracking app that excluded women because it didn't include menstrual cycles, or the social media app that pushed a daughter's photo into a dad's timeline with a celebratory whoop ... on the anniversary of her death, or the ride-share app with numerous pop-ups that is hard to use in the dark, walking fast, with low battery, trying to get a lift out of a bad neighbourhood. These kinds of threats to inclusivity, emotiona...

This week I listened to a Ministry of Testing podcast on exploratory testing .  After the intros, as the panelists  attempted in turn to give their definitions of exploratory testing, I realised that I didn't have one for myself. It's not that I don't know or haven't seen definitions. Here's one I've heard a few times, from back in 2008, in A Tutorial in Exploratory Testing by Cem Kaner:  Exploratory software testing is a style of software testing that emphasizes the personal freedom and responsibility of the individual tester to continually optimize the quality of her work by treating test-related learning, test design, test execution, and test result interpretation as mutually supportive activities that run in parallel throughout the project. It's not that I think The Exploratory Elders like Kaner got it right back in the day and their words should be carved on monumental stones and polished on Sundays, or that I'm not interested any more. I was readi...

  Testing Stories is a new ebook written by testers about their testing: Software testing professionals from around the globe have volunteered to each share a story related to software testing, with the aim of inspiring others from their experiences. The team have decided to donate all royalties sold through leanpub to Open Sourcing Mental Illness , as we collectively value their mission statement and work in mental health in the tech and open source communities. This is a fun project and, more importantly, a good cause. I was happy to contribute along with Dave Symonds, Richard Hill, Sandhya Krishnan, Feroz Ally, Venkat Ramakrishnan, Louise Harney, Haroon Sheikh, Haroon Sheikh, Patricio Miner, Bruce Hughes, Felipe Knorr Kuhn, Louise Woodhams, Mike Harris, Aaron Flynn, Ady Stokes, Kim Cote, Peter Johnson, Ben Dowen, Claire Reckless, Laveena Ramchandani, Andrea Jensen, Steven Devonport, Sapan Parikh, Beth Marshall, Prashant Hegde, Johanna South, Suman Bala, Michael "Fritz" Fr...