Hiccupps

  The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book,  Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide  responses to common questions and statements about testing from a  context-driven perspective . It's being edited by  Lee Hawkins  who is  posing questions on  Twitter ,   LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST  mailing list  and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to  contribute  by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me?   --00-- "Pair and ensemble testing look like a waste of time and resources to me. What do you think?" You're right! Sometimes.   But also not pairing or ensembling is a waste of time and r

The big story in IT right now is Crowdstrike 's unfortunate update that prompted millions of Windows machines to BSOD and caused chaos in critical infrastructure around the world. Actually, that's not just big, it's BIG or B. I. G. or maybe B! I! G! and it's provoked loads of speculation about the hows and whys and what-should-haves and what-didn'ts. But even on a week without that scale of fail, even on a week where nothing untoward happened on any computer anywhere, the observation I'm sharing here probably wouldn't merit much coverage.  This is it: Do you see? Just under the orange bar, the word OLIVE. Why? Don't get me wrong, I like olives. I just don't expect to see them on the BBC Sounds player while I'm setting myself up to listen to England win the cricket at the weekend. Of course, if you look a bit closer and wait a second or two, you'll see that there's a slight vertical alignment difference between the O and LIVE and the th

Last weekend I participated in the LLandegfan Exploratory Workshop on Testing (LLEWT) 2024, a peer conference in a small parish hall on Anglesey, north Wales. The topic was communication and I shared my sketchnotes and a mind map from the day a few days ago. This post summarises my experience report.  Express, Listen, and Field Just about the most hands-on, practical, and valuable training I have ever done was on assertiveness with a local Cambridge coach, Laura Dain . In it she introduced Express, Listen, and Field (ELF), distilled from her experience across many years in the women’s movement, business, and academia.  ELF: say your key message clearly and calmly, actively listen to the response, and then focus only on what is relevant to your needs. I blogged a little about it back in 2017 and I've been using it ever since. Assertiveness In a previous role, I was the manager of a test team and organised training for the whole team

This weekend I was at LLEWT 2024, a peer conference on Anglesey , north Wales, discussing communication. Given the day jobs of the participants, it was no surprise that the experience reports and the conversations that followed them mostly focussed on software development contexts.  Notes from my presentation are in Express, Listen, and Field . I made sketchnotes (below) for each presentation and a mindmap (above) to try to summarise the whole. Without much reflection yet, I guess I would pull these common high-level threads from the day: There are multiple reasons that communication fails  ... like, duh! ... but having multiple strategies for framing a message can help ... and having multiple tactics for delivering a message can help too. Understanding what you want from an interaction is key ... so setting the context to make that more likely is wise ... which might mean meta-conversation, being transparent, or changing your approach ...