Training testers at different skill levels has led me to reflect on different skill backgrounds and how they affect test automation approach. I believe that my background in software development shaped my approach to test automation in very different ways to testers who learned test automation as their first experience with programming. I completed a […]
When I am consulted for automated testing projects, I often find that the teams are familiar with unit tests and whole-system tests (think end-to-end tests driven through the GUI, designed to replace manual tests). However I find that teams have trouble defining tests in between the sizes of “unit” and “everything”. Developers sometimes start from […]
It’s been almost a year since I started taking a day each week to write out my achievements and take care of any unpleasant tasks. I call this Frog Day. I’m still doing this a year later and it’s still incredibly useful. Here are some of the things I learned from doing this. Putting Health […]
This November I’ll be in Potsdam, Germany to give a keynote and a workshop for Agile Testing Days. I’ve never been to Agile Testing Days before but I’ve heard it’s awesome so I’m really excited. Last year they had about 400 attendees of which a quarter were speakers! The speaker lineup this year looks just […]
I’m proud to be the compère for Test Bash Sydney, a one-day conference coming to our shores this October. Test Bash is a single-track conference with just 9 talks. It’s been wildly popular overseas due to the wonderful community it attracts via Ministry of Test. It’s a great conference for inspiration and for building your […]
Interested in hearing me talk about test automation, test management and more? Well, it’s your lucky week! Listen to me chat about all things software testing with Gem Hill on the “Let’s talk about tests, baby” podcast. This episode is called Testers are the canary down the coalmine. I had so much fun chatting to […]
How do I get teams to meet their testing goals when I’m so busy putting out fires all day? How do I convince management to change the testing culture within a development team? How do I motivate my team to improve their skills? If you’d like to know the answers to questions like this, join […]
If you’ve got a spare 15 minutes, do fill out Practitest’s#StateofTesting survey. It provides useful data for the software testing industry and the results are always interesting. It’s a great reference for talks and blog posts too, when you need to cite evidence of current trends. You can find the survey here: http://qablog.practitest.com/state-of-testing/
Since getting into Dungeons & Dragons tabletop gaming this year, a few people in the software development and testing community have chatted to me about parallels between D&D and software development. In particular, there has been some interest around the way players are assigned roles, skill levels and abilities – does this sound like your […]
This is a talk I gave to kick off the new Quality Engineering Meetup in Sydney. I thought it would be fun to draw some cartoon characters for my slides. I drew a bunny and a bee. Cute, right? Well I’m at the point in my speaking career where I’m getting kind of bored […]