Hiccupps

Wow. I've been thinking about public speaking and me. Wind back a year or so. Early in November 2015 I presented my talk, my maiden conference talk, the first conference talk I'd had accepted, in fact the only conference talk I had ever submitted, on a massive stage, in a huge auditorium, to an audience of expectant software testers who had paid large amounts of money to be there, and chosen my talk over three others on parallel tracks . That was EuroSTAR in Maastricht. I was mainlining cough medicine and menthol sweets for the heavy cold I'd developed and I was losing my voice. The thing lasted 45 minutes and when I was finished I felt like I was flying. Wind back another year or so. At the end of July 2014 I said a few words and gave a leaving present to one of my colleagues in front of a few members of staff in the small kitchen at work. I was healthy and the only drug I could possibly be under the influence of was tea (although I do like it strong ). The thin...

My second eBook has just been released! It's called Your Testing is a Joke and it's a slight edit of the piece that won the Best Paper prize at EuroSTAR 2015 . Here's the blurb: Edward de Bono, in his Lateral Thinking books, makes a strong connection between humour and creativity. Creativity is key to testing, but jokes? Well, the punchline for a joke could be a violation of some expectation, the exposure of some ambiguity, an observation that no one else has made, or just making a surprising connection. Jokes can make you think and then laugh. But they don't always work. Does that sound familiar? This eBook takes a genuine joke-making process and deconstructs it to make comparisons between aspects of joking and concepts from testing such as the difference between a fault and a failure, oracles, heuristics, factoring, modelling testing as the exploration of a space of possibilities, stopping strategies, bug advocacy and the possibility that a bug, today, in thi...

My face rests just north of miserable. (In a previous blog post I once called it the growler .) Sadly for me, from that starting point just a little puzzlement, thought, irritation or even too much milk in my tea can turn it into an apparent mask of rage. I usually remain blissfully unaware at the time, despite the fact that friends, family and colleagues have all told me about it. Given this, you might think it ironic that my EuroSTAR 2015 talk was about making people laugh, about the analogy I perceive between joke-making and testing and how I exercise my testing muscles when I'm not testing by exploratory joking. Or perhaps that simply makes you chuckle. Here's the slides: I enjoyed presenting, was delighted with the reaction, and then a little surprised to find myself instinctively asking everyone who spoke to me afterwards whether they felt there was something practical that they could take from it. Dour? For sure, but also a doer. Image: Twitter

In his EuroSTAR 2015 talk, Iain McCowatt described an ongoing project which involves establishing testing principles for his teams, across projects. In a large organisation in a heavily-regulated environment such as his, this is a really significant challenge, but he described an interesting, pragmatic approach based on Simon Sinek's Golden Circle . While discussing the principles that he and his team arrived at, he said something slowly and with great emphasis: We really sweated the semantics. The principles are important. They are directly tied to and defined to support the purpose of testing for his company. They are the foundation for all decisions that will be made about testing in the company. As you might expect given this, he was careful to also define what he means by a principle. For the record, this is it: Principles are heuristics and shared values that guide our thinking about how to test and organize our testing.  I enjoyed Michael Bolton 's talk, No M...

Jerry Weinberg oozed out of many of the talks at EuroSTAR 2015 . He was most visible as the hero at the heart of Kristoffer Nordstrom 's keynote but numerous other talks that I attended and conversations that I had directly or indirectly, knowingly or unknowingly, as quote or in spirit offered some variant of this famous line : No matter what the problem is, it's always a people problem.  The observation that in testing we need to remember that we deal with people was a seam running through the the conference. A seam from which value can be extracted. A seam containing testing ore. And probably also testing lore, shared around by these speakers, these self-declared conversationalists, coffee cup evangelists, shoe leatherers. These kinds of testers do not view testing as just being heads-down in the product trying to break things (as valuable as that can be). They are out and talking to people, they are recognising (actual or potential) problems outside of the software ...

In his keynote at EuroSTAR 2015 Rikard Edgren said many things that resonated with me. This was the one that rang out loudest: Testing is simple: you understand what is important and then you test it. Followed almost immediately by Testing is complicated.  Testing as recursion. A simple statement hiding deep complexity. An elegant surface belying the turbulence underneath. This is so beautiful. It put me in mind of fractals such as the Mandelbrot set where a benign-looking equation, if exercised, generates never-ending, self-similar, ever-finer detail. Searching for related insight, I see that Adam Knight has arrived in a similar place from a different direction. (And be sure to read the comments there for a salutary caution against shallow analogy .) Image: https://flic.kr/p/7LF46G Edit: In the comments in  How Models Change , Michael Bolton describes a model of testing as fractal and Adam later revisited his ideas  and spoke about them to the Cambri...

If you give yourself some space you can usually find another perspective. I'm British, and so European, but wouldn't call myself a star and I rarely look at warez these dayz.  I am speaking at EuroSTAR next week, though:  eurostarsoftwaretesting.com . Image:  https://flic.kr/p/mwHHWC