Hiccupps

I spoke at UKSTAR 2018 this week, an eight-minute talk in a Storytelling track. This post is a prettied-up version of the notes I made for it along with some of the slides. The full slide deck is in the Media page . My story is called The Anatomy of a Definition of Testing. It's not a suspense story though, so I'll give you the definition right up front: Testing is the pursuit of relevant incongruity. That is, for me, testing is the pursuit of relevant incongruity. But how did I get there? Well, the journey started with Explore It! by Elisabeth Hendrickson, a great book about exploratory testing which has, near the beginning, this definition: Tested = Checked + Explored It's finessed a little by Neither checking nor exploring is sufficient on its own and the idea that testing is to ... interact with the software or system, observe its actual behavior, and compare that to your expectations. Interestingly, the definition doesn't really play a sig...

The latest in my occasional series of experiments in sketchnoting , this time from UKSTAR 2018 . The sketchnote/video thing I did as a promo for my own storytelling talk is still available here . 

Four lightning talks at the Cambridge Tester meetup at Linguamatics last night, four topics apparently unrelated to one another, four slices through testing. Yet, as I write up my notes this morning I wonder whether there's a common thread ... Samuel Lewis showed us the money. Or, at least, where the money is held before being dispensed through those holes in the wall. He included some fascinating background information about ATMs (and a scary security story) but the thrust of his talk was the risks and corresponding mitigation strategies in a massive project to migrate the ATMs for a big bank to a new application layer and OS (more scariness: many are still running Windows XP). Much of the approach involved audit trails of various kinds, with customer and other stakeholders sharing their road maps and getting a view of the test planning and strategy in return. I enjoyed that the customer themselves was considered a risk (because they had a reputation for changing their mi...

I'm speaking on the Storytelling track at UKSTAR 2018. In eight minutes I'm going to explain how I arrived at my own definition of testing, why I bothered, and what I do with it now I've got it.  You can find some of the background in these posts: Another Define Mess Testing All the Way Down and Other Directions The Anatomy of a Definition of Testing and I made a kind of sketchnote video thing to promote it too: If you still want to come after all that, get 10% off, on me: See you there I hope.