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Some of my stuff in or for other places.

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    Talks 

    2023-06-28 Ministry of Testing, Norwich

    2022-12-10 Agile Testing Alliance Global Testing Retreat

     

    2022-11-16 BCS Testing, Diversity, AI Conference

     

     

    2022-10-20 MoT API Challenge in Python

    2022-10-14 Hands-on for CAST 2022 Webinar

     

    2022-01-14 EC Utbildning & 2022-01-25 MoT Cambridge

    2021-05-21 AST Career Day

     

    2020-12-28 QA Daily Inspirational Talks

     

    2020-05-20 OnlineTestConf

     

    2019-11-25 CEWT #7

     

    2019-11-14 Cambridge Agile Exchange

     

    2018-08-29 SoftTest Ireland

     

    2018-09-23 CEWT #6

     

    2018-03-13 UKSTAR

      


    2018-01-28 CEWT #5

     

    2016-11-06 CEWT #3

    2016-04-09 MEWT #5

    2016-02-28 CEWT #2

    2015-11-04 EuroSTAR

    2015-07-10 UKTMF

    2015-07-04 CEWT #1

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    Popular posts from this blog

    Meet Me Halfway?

      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-- "Stop answering my questions with questions." Sure, I can do that. In return, please stop asking me questions so open to interpretation that any answ...
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    The Best Programmer Dan Knows

      I was pairing with my friend Vernon at work last week, on a tool I've been developing. He was smiling broadly as I talked him through what I'd done because we've been here before. The tool facilitates a task that's time-consuming, inefficient, error-prone, tiresome, and important to get right. Vern knows that those kinds of factors trigger me to change or build something, and that's why he was struggling not to laugh out loud. He held himself together and asked a bunch of sensible questions about the need, the desired outcome, and the approach I'd taken. Then he mentioned a talk by Daniel Terhorst-North, called The Best Programmer I Know, and said that much of it paralleled what he sees me doing. It was my turn to laugh then, because I am not a good programmer, and I thought he knew that already. What I do accept, though, is that I am focussed on the value that programs can give, and getting some of that value as early as possible. He sent me a link to the ta...
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    Beginning Sketchnoting

    In September 2017 I attended  Ian Johnson 's visual note-taking workshop at  DDD East Anglia . For the rest of the day I made sketchnotes, including during Karo Stoltzenburg 's talk on exploratory testing for developers  (sketch below), and since then I've been doing it on a regular basis. Karo recently asked whether I'd do a Team Eating (the Linguamatics brown bag lunch thing) on sketchnoting. I did, and this post captures some of what I said. Beginning sketchnoting, then. There's two sides to that: I still regard myself as a beginner at it, and today I'll give you some encouragement and some tips based on my experience, to begin sketchnoting for yourselves. I spend an enormous amount of time in situations where I find it helpful to take notes: testing, talking to colleagues about a problem, reading, 1-1 meetings, project meetings, workshops, conferences, and, and, and, and I could go on. I've long been interested in the approaches I've evol...
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    How do I Test AI?

      Recently a few people have asked me how I test AI. I'm happy to share my experiences, but I frame the question more broadly, perhaps something like this: what kinds of things do I consider when testing systems with artificial intelligence components .  I freestyled liberally the first time I answered but when the question came up again I thought I'd write a few bullets to help me remember key things. This post is the latest iteration of that list. Caveats: I'm not an expert; what you see below is a reminder of things to pick up on during conversations so it's quite minimal; it's also messy; it's absolutely not a guide or a set of best practices; each point should be applied in context; the categories are very rough; it's certainly not complete.  Also note that I work with teams who really know what they're doing on the domain, tech, and medical safety fronts and some of the things listed here are things they'd typically do some or all of. Testing ...
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    Don't Know? Find Out!

    In What We Know We Don't Know , Hillel Wayne crisply summarises a handful of research findings about software development, describes how the research is carried out and reviewed and how he explores it, and contrasts those evidence-based results with the pronouncements of charismatic thought leaders. He also notes how and why this kind of research is hard in the software world. I won't pull much from the talk because I want to encourage you to watch it. Go on, it's reasonably short, it's comprehensible for me at 1.25x, and you can skip the section on Domain-Driven Design (the talk was at DDD Europe) if that's not your bag. Let me just give the same example that he opens with: research shows that most code reviews focus more on the first file presented to reviewers rather than the most important file in the eye of the developer. What we should learn: flag the starting and other critical files to receive more productive reviews. You never even thought about that possi...
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    My Adidas

    If you've met me anywhere outside of a wedding or funeral, a snowy day, or a muddy field in the last 20 years you'll have seen me in Adidas Superstar trainers. But why? This post is for April Cools' Club .  --00-- I'm the butt of many jokes in our house, but not having a good memory features prominently amongst them. See also being bald ("do you need a hat, Dad?"), wearing jeans that have elastane in them (they're very comfy but "oh look, he's got the jeggings on again!"), and finding joy in contorted puns ("no-one's laughing except you, you know that, right?") Which is why it's interesting that I have a very strong, if admittedly not complete, memory of the first time I heard Run DMC. Raising Hell , their third album, was released in the UK in May 1986 and I bought it pretty much immediately after hearing it on the evening show on Radio 1, probably presented by Janice Long, ...
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    Going Underground

    The map is not the territory. You've heard this before and I've quoted it before . The longer quote (due to Alfred Korzybski) from which the snappy soundbite originated adds some valuable context: A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness. I was thinking about that this week as I came to a product new to me but quite mature with a very rich set of configuration options. When I say rich , I mean — without casting any shade, because I have been there and understand — it is set in multiple locations, has extensive potential effects, and is often difficult to understand.  For my current project I consider it crucial to get a non-shallow view of how this works and so I began to explore. While there is some limited documentation it is, as so often, not up to date so mostly I worked in the codebases. Yes, plural, because this product spans multiple r...
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    Not a Happy Place

      A few months ago I stopped having therapy because I felt I had stabilised myself enough to navigate life without it. For the time being, anyway.  I'm sure the counselling helped me but I couldn't tell you how and I've chosen not to look deeply into it. For someone who is usually pretty analytical this is perhaps an interesting decision but I knew that I didn't want to be second-guessing my counsellor, Sue, or mentally cross-referencing stuff that I'd researched while we were talking. And talk was what we mostly did, with Sue suggesting hardly any specific tools for me to try. One that she did recommend was finding a happy place to visualise, somewhere that I could be out of the moment for a moment to calm disruptive thoughts. (Something like this .) Surprisingly, I found that I couldn't conjure anywhere up inside my head. That's when I realised that I've always had difficulty seeing with my mind's eye but never called it out. If I try to imagine ev...
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    Notes on Testing Notes

    Ben Dowen pinged me and others on Twitter last week , asking for "a nice concise resource to link to for a blog post - about taking good Testing notes." I didn't have one so I thought I'd write a few words on how I'm doing it at the moment for my work at Ada Health, alongside Ben. You may have read previously that I use a script to upload Markdown-based text files to Confluence . Here's the template that I start from: # Date + Title # Mission # Summary WIP! # Notes Then I fill out what I plan to do. The Mission can be as high or low level as I want it to be. Sometimes, if deeper context might be valuable I'll add a Background subsection to it. I don't fill in the Summary section until the end. It's a high-level overview of what I did, what I found, risks identified, value provided, and so on. Between the Mission and Summary I hope that a reader can see what I initially intended and what actually...
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    Around the Testing World in 28 Ways

    The Association for Software Testing has been crowdsourcing a book, Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , for the last three years. Over that time 28 questions or statements about testing have been posed to our community and the various answers collected and collapsed into a single reply. Lee Hawkins, the coordinator of the project, has just blogged about the experience in The wisdom of the crowd has created an awesome resource for context-driven testers . He pulled some statistics out of the records he's kept showing the level of interest in each question or statement, measured by the number of responses from the community. That's the red bars on the chart at the top, ranging in value from 4 to 28. I replied every single time Lee posted, with a very specific mission in mind: 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 fa...
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