We love to gather and share. Every week (for 135 weeks so far) we’ve been gathering the latest information from the community sharing it via email and social media. We thought it was about time to share it on the web. You can subscribe to the email version here.
The abysmal state of ‘testing’ in 2016 – and what can we do about it?
I’m sure you’ve all heard it before, but I thought for a bit of fun and serious discussion I would bring up the topic of what can we do to help change the perception of software testing?
So to give an example, there have been a couple of blog posts in the past week talking about testing:
One from the angle of ‘aarggh, testing is not all about automation’.
The other on ‘aargh, of course, manual testing still exists’ Read full post…
Practical Tips on How to Transition from Traditional to Modern Testing Practices
Understanding the value of the modern software delivery chain is easy, but how to execute it in real life is not always as simple. It is difficult to argue against the obvious benefits of automated testing — accelerated delivery, improved quality, and reduced costs — yet a transformation is required of all organizations moving from manual testing to automated testing. Register for the webinar…
Writing Tests Doesn’t Have to Be Extra Work
Writing automated tests is sort of like the kale of the software development community. With the exception of a few outlying “get off my lawn” types, there’s near-universal agreement that it’s “the right thing.” And that leaves a few different camps of people….
Why I still like pyramids
The testing pyramid is widely used approach towards testing in agile projects, yet it starts to get a bad reputation with testers like Richard Bradshaw, who according to John Stevenson proclaimed the pyramid is dead on MEWT [1], or James Bach, who states “it has little to do with testing” [2]. So why is that?
Grading Proposals: My Experience
After writing a few of my own proposals to attend conferences I was asked to participate in grading proposals for Test Bash Philadelphia. This is my experience.
Nonjudgmental Feedback
People are not like dogs. How often have you seen someone recommending the giving of praise as a way of raising morale, increasing engagement, making folks happier, and so on? The thing is, giving praise has a significant downside.
Present Moment Coaching
On Thursday 21st April I attended a “Life Coaching” Meet Up called “Present Moment Coaching” hosted above The Engineer Pub in Primrose Hill, London. I wasn’t really sure what to expect but it was an interesting evening.
Maximum Safe Speed of QA – How Fast Can You Go (Safely)?
As technologists, our main goal is to produce the highest quality software in the shortest amount of time. And a concept that I’ve started using is to describe velocity in terms of safety.
Emotions and trigger words in exploring
This post is inspired from two sessions of mob exploratory testing. I did one in Agile Serbia -conference on Saturday, and Llewellyn Falco did one on pre-Craftconf meetup in Hungary reusing my session description.
How would you count bug reports you never get?
There’s recently been a significant transformation on a piece of software we work on with my team. In the last month, we’ve done more releases of that piece than we managed to do in the year before it. There’s a clear feeling of progress. And the progress has included the amount of code for the piece dropping to a quarter of where we started off with the transformation. The final frontier of siloed development has joined team ownership and our drive to clean up things to be understood.
Announcing Masters of the Ministry
At The Ministry of Testing we are constantly experimenting and evolving. We fail. We succeed. And then along the way we discover new things and ideas that we feel compelled to do. Read and watch the video…
What problems do we have with our test automation?
One of the things I like about my role is that I get to work with different teams who are testing different products. The opportunities and challenges in each of our teams is very different, which gives me a lot of material for problem solving and experimenting as a coach.
More on the “commoditisation of testing”
I recently saw an article about UBS centralizing its “QA”. A few parts of the article stood out for me…
Ok Cupid, the man that hacked it and what it means to you…
I was reading about a mathematician last week. Well, he got on a dating site and being mathematical, he figured out how to circumvent the algorithm to get a priority listing with females.
MVP or not?! – A misunderstood pic goes viral
This morning a pic showed up in my timeline that I had hoped not to see again. But it seems the pic has gone viral and is used out of context numerous times. It was a picture from the Agile Testing Days Scandinavia keynote “Why we do not need testers on the team” by Bent Myllerup to demonstrate the concept of an agile approach to software development, delivering value more often and developing software iterative and incremental.
The Icky and Good Words In Software Testing
The software testing world has moved on in the past few years and we have an image problem. So we asked software testers of the world what words made them feel good or icky. This the result.
Testing a RESTful API using Supertest
This post explains how Supertest can be used to test any RESTful API even those that don’t run through express.
Deep Down, We’re All Problem Solvers
It’s true. Every day, people get up, go to work and go solve problems there. People get hired, and get paid money, to solve problems. They even come home and solve more problems.
Trends in Testing Terminology
There are lots of things to consider when trying to recruit or develop software testers especially industry trends, both within the testing community and in the larger software engineering community. In a small community like ours those trends might include development practices, tools, techniques and terminology (among others). As I was contemplating these trends on my own I came across this fun graphic by the Ministry of Testing called “Words That Make Testers Feel Good” and thought it was worth sharing.
