The EuroSTAR Blog

Hello all! For this weekend's read, I downloaded and printed the (free!) "A Lucky Shot at Agile" eBook written by Zeger Van Hese. It is a best-paper award piece from last year's EuroSTAR, and recently a webinar too. I had to miss the webinar due to scheduling conflicts, so having it on book now is a good opportunity to catch up. I will write a little bit about the eBook here, but I recommend you still read the full story on this link (this is a review only, not a summary).

I frequent many of online forums. It's a great way to grow and learn, as the discussions are fantastic opportunities to challenge us with questions we don't face on our day to day work. I also enjoy the questions that I do encounter in my day to day, because when answering these (or reading answers) for a context different from mine, I discover new ways of thinking about matters I do out of routine...

Our world is changing all the time. When I had my first job interview as a tester I just had to answer three questions with ‘yes' to get the job (I see in your CV you did a course on testing, it that so? And you want to be a tester on our project? Are you serious about this?). By now we don't get away with a three day testing course.

Testing is more than finding bugs. Most readers would agree with me that Testing is a multi disciplinary profession, Challenging in more than one way.

I have been almost exclusively testing mobile apps on Android devices (Smartphones and Tablets) and the iPad2 for nearly a year. In this article I use "iDevice" to include the iPhone and iPad. As with web and desktop applications there is a certain process or routine a tester follows from the time an app is installed (or accessed) until a bug report with evidence (logs & video files) is submitted.

Discussing the career of a software tester as an evolution, and what we can do to provide ourselves with competetive advantage in a changing environment. My talk at Eurostar this year, entitled "An Evolution into Specification by Example", discusses the progress of the development team at my organisation as an evolutionary process. It is a fitting title in more ways than one, as presenting the talk marks a stage in my evolution as a software tester as well, being the first time that I have presented at such a high profile event.

Software testing is an exercise of skill performed with the human mind. Some of the best testers out there that I know, for example Michael Bolton (@michaelbolton), is not developers.That being said we really need divergent testing departments so we get different types of thinking when doing software testing.

What a load of crap! I’m a software testing professional for over 16 years now and sure, I played the game ‘blame the developers’. I too once kept a log of statements and replies to bugs; ‘That’s by design’, ‘It doesn’t do that on my system’, ‘No user would ever do that!’. It took me long enough, but I finally found a place where it all comes together. And to be honest, I always suspected, but saw it as Utopia, the unreachable.

A large part of a tester’s job involves delivering potentially unwelcome news about a product or project to managers. Too often, the interaction doesn’t go as well as we’d like and we end up losing credibility and jeopardising our effectiveness. 

Turning "bad news" into valuable information for management takes skill, as can dealinging with many of a recipient's reactions. For most people, the ability to do these things at all - let alone well - does not come easily.

The methods and techniques we use are sometimes so complex that we even don't understand each other. The consequence of this is that stakeholders don't understand us. This isolates us and can block the integration of testing in the organisation.