Listen beyond the pass and fail – a story of looking at the bigger picture

Note: This was originally published as a guest blog post for DevTestOps Community. I started a new job a few years back, with one of my responsibilities stated as “Move the existing automation to the next level”. The company already had a lot of automated tests in place and had worked really hard on making automation a part of the normal team delivery. Great! I´ve worked with a lot of problematic automation and I know…

How to deal with criticism with being a tester

A while back, I had the pleasure of doing an online interview with Viv Richards and Graham Ellis around my contribution to the book "Around the world with 80 testers". My contribution is based on a talk called "My journey from dev to tester" and it is about my experience and learnings from that career switch. It was a lovely chat, even if we got some zoom bombers, and a great opportunity to further explore…

Would Heu-risk it? Part 32: Wrap up time!

NOTE: As you might notice: The individual posts have been removed due to the fact that they have been compiled into a book. The book is available on LeanPub or on Amazon. I hope you all understand and I would love for you to support me by buying a copy. The cards are available through Ministry Of Testing who I partnered with to make sure as many as possible get access to them. It has…

Would Heu-risk it? Part 1: Introduction

Note: This was the first part in a series of blog posts about the "Would Heu-risk it?" game I created for a workshop with Lisa Crispin at Agile Testing Days 2019. Since then, these posts have turned into a book. The individual posts have been removed but the book can be bought on LeanPub or on Amazon. I hope you all understand and I would love for you to support me by buying a copy.…

Delivering fast and slow – Ethics of Software Quality

Note: This blog post was originally published as a guest blog post on the LogiGear Blog under the name Continuous Quality – Ethical aspects of software testing Daily, we are pushing the boundaries of how fast we can deliver software. Delivering something new, better, faster than our competition can mean incredible payoff and we are constantly being asked to cut costs and deliver more, faster, cheaper. But then suddenly you wake up to 189 dead…

What (other) skills are most important for a tester?

I recently had the pleasure of attending TestBash Germany both as a workshop fascilitator and as a part of a speaker panel. On the panel we got to answer a wide range of question and I spoke a bit about teaching and mentoring junior testers. After the panel I was approached by a wonderful woman who asked me the fantastic question: "What (non-testing) skill/area is most important to learn as a tester?". My short answer…

When live gives you lemons – don’t let Bobby Drop-Tables steal them

So my recent Power Hour at Ministry of Testing got me thinking. To start: I'm sorry, tomorrow-morning-me, apparently I had to write this now, while on the rush of that experience. Why am I feeling this rush? From a Q&A? Well. I'm doing a workshop about security testing and OWASP Juice Shop this fall and I've been worrying about it. - Maybe it's too easy and scripted? - Will people learn anything? - What if…

Testing vs. Checking – separate entities or part of a whole?

There has been a lot ofdiscussion, heated and calm, about the concept of testing. What it is. What it is not. Arguments about real testing vs. what a lot of people imagine when they hear the word. Twitter and blog posts talking about “real testing”, “the future of test”, “no testing” and so on, seemingly endlessly. To be honest, I’ve had a hard time grasping a lot of it and some distinctions don’t make sense…

CAST 2018 # 2: Recruiting for potential

Apart from my workshop, I also got to do a presentation at CAST 2018 - Recruiting for Potential. If you are only looking for the slides, or want to check the slides before/after you read this post, they can be found here, along with a few of our cases. This started out with the fact that I have grown uncomfortable with the standard recruiting process* over the years. No, let’s be honest: I’ve always disliked…

CAST 2018 #1: Speedtesting Workshop

So, at CAST 2018  I had the pleasure of doing a workshop with my friend and colleague Tomas Rosenqvist. The title was "Speedtesting using mind maps" and consisted of 90 intense minutes of interaction with the awesome "Bling R Us" webshop that we created some time ago as a recruitment exercise (I'll get back to that in the next post...) The purpose of the workshop is to show how using a mind map template can…