Girl, interrupted.

“Something magical happens when testers and programmers start to collaborate.”¹

I’ve submitted a conference talk last weekend.² It has the heroic (*cough*) title of “Testing Demystified” and is now handed in for the Developer! Developer! Developer! East Anglia event taking place later this year (on Saturday, 16 September 2017), which is part of the Developer Days events series for the UK .NET Community. It’s make is very community driven, about sharing and learning in a friendly environment, which I find absolutely fantastic. The whole day is free to attend, on a weekend (so outside usual working hours), sessions submitted are voted on by the community, e.g. the prospective attendees, e.g. you, and it targets (and supports) the local speaker community. Oh, and it has “Developer” in the title. Thrice. So why have I, a Tester, submitted a talk for this, exactly?

Twitter Timeline Q1/17

#March

18 great 99sec talks – Final #testbash #testbashbrighton #99sectalks @VeraGeBa @EnquireTST @PaulHolland_TWN @2bittester @huibschoots … pic.twitter.com/ULSEOStQq0

— Viola Korte (@vioble) March 24, 2017

What are testers? Definition by @aldos #Testbash #TestBashBrighton pic.twitter.com/XhCcBNorf0

— Ministry of Testing (@ministryoftest) March 24, 2017

Everyone keeps looking at me funny… #testbash Haha!

— Dan Ashby (@DanAshby04) March 24, 2017

Testing Puzzles: Questions, Assumptions, Strategy

For the recent evening Ministry of Testing Meetup here in Cambridge I brought some Testing Puzzles for people to solve. Or rather some Puzzles for people to test, naturally, and on the hunt for appropriate puzzles I tried to find types that would give us an opportunity to exercise and reflect on basic testing skills.

The evening was a blast and great fun, as was the preparation; of course I had to try out all the puzzles and riddles and challenges myself first to find the good ones! I ended up with about five puzzles which I vaguely fitted into three different categories (questions & assumptions, strategy, models), and some backups, although we ended up doing only three puzzles of two of the types, but that still gave us plenty of ground to cover and a variety of different angles to explore.

Organise? A way!

I went to the World Information Architecture Day in London recently – our UX Designer, Rog, had been before and I gladly tagged along. And as often, if you emerge yourself in a new area, you’ll get great input and learn new things by even just poking into it. As happened, even before the day started, I got some great advice.

Being asked about my motivation to attend, I elaborated that I often get quite frustrated by ordering information or data and was really hoping to get some ideas, strategies, good practices on how to find my way through the jungle and make sense of unstructured data for myself and others. And I got this great response: “Well, there are five ways to structure information.”

Twitter Timeline Q4/16

#December

I just found the #test page from @imdb, complete with trailer, actors, trivia and stuff: https://t.co/xmt27CRr5P 😀

— Marcel Gehlen (@Marcel_Gehlen) December 30, 2016

Being proud of 100% test coverage is like being proud of reading every word in the newspaper. Some are more important than others.

— Kent Beck (@KentBeck) December 24, 2016

Can't believe I just had to defend the use of code reviews. I need a drink!

— Angie Jones (@techgirl1908) December 22, 2016

Cambridge Lean Coffee 01/17

First Lean Coffee of the year, and the first Lean Coffee and second overall Meetup via our shiny new dedicated Ministry of Testing Cambridge Meetup Group. If you’re in the Cambridge area and interested in testing, sign up!

We’ve met at Redgate – with many thanks to Chris George for organising and Jose Lima and Gareth Bragg for hosting. Great attendance, we’ve ended up with three groups, of which I had the pleasure to facilitate one, which is always good fun. We tackled the following topics:

At least one, probably no more than six

I really enjoy the moments when I occupy myself with something far, far away from testing and it suddenly makes complete sense and shines light upon a topic that I know from work. Obviously I’m the connecting factor in the equation, but it amuses me nonetheless to read about screwdrivers as a description of the advantages you gain with testing, to follow a bagel recipe and draw analogies to performance testing or to enjoy Borges and find the importance of context shown as its finest.