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Some of my stuff in or for other places.

Books

Articles

Resources

 Interviews

Podcasts

    Talks 

    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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    Enjoy Testing

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    Testing (AI) is Testing

    Last November I gave a talk, Random Exploration of a Chatbot API , at the BCS Testing, Diversity, AI Conference .  It was a nice surprise afterwards to be offered a book from their catalogue and I chose Artificial Intelligence and Software Testing by Rex Black, James Davenport, Joanna Olszewska, Jeremias Rößler, Adam Leon Smith, and Jonathon Wright.  This week, on a couple of train journeys around East Anglia, I read it and made sketchnotes. As someone not deeply into this field, but who has been experimenting with AI as a testing tool at work, I found the landscape view provided by the book interesting, particularly the lists: of challenges in testing AI, of approaches to testing AI, and of quality aspects to consider when evaluating AI.  Despite the hype around the area right now there's much that any competent tester will be familiar with, and skills that translate directly. Where there's likely to be novelty is in the technology, and the technical domain, and the effect of
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    Agile Testing Questioned

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    Testers are Gate-Crashers

      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-- "Testers are the gatekeepers of quality" Instinctively I don't like the sound of that, but I wonder what you mean by it. Perhaps one or more of these? Testers set the quality sta
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    Leaps and Boundary Objects

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    Where No-one Else Looks

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    Am I Wrong?

    I happened across Exploratory Testing: Why Is It Not Ideal for Agile Projects? by Vitaly Prus this week and I was triggered. But why? I took a few minutes to think that through. Partly, I guess, I feel directly challenged. I work on an agile project (by the definition in the article) and I would say that I use exclusively exploratory testing. Naturally, I like to think I'm doing a good job. Am I wrong? After calming down, and re-reading the article a couple of times, I don't think so. 😸 From the start, even the title makes me tense. The ideal solution is a perfect solution, the best solution. My context-driven instincts are reluctant to accept the premise, and I wonder what the author thinks is an ideal solution for an agile project, or any project. I notice also that I slid so easily from "an approach is not ideal" into "I am not doing a good job" and, in retrospect, that makes me smile. It doesn't do any harm to be reminded that your cognitive bias
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    External Brains

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