This is a companion piece for my talk “Testing Demystified” at the DDD East Anglia, where I encourage people from other disciplines, namely programmers, to get more involved in (exploratory) testing activities (because it’s fun! And worth it!). And here are some really simple steps that you can take:
… and repeat.
Continue reading
“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?
#June
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.
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.”
