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Welcome to the new testerthoughts.com!
This weekend has seen a frenzy of activity as my wife and I moved the Tester Thoughts blog to it’s new home on a self-hosted WordPress server. There are several benefits to doing this:I have more...
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Heather & Andy interviewed for TWiST podcast
A few weeks back, Heather and I spent a wonderful hour talking to Matt Heusser, the host of the This Week in Software Testing podcast. Our conversation covered all sorts of topics, and the time flew...
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How the Study of Art informs my Testing
I study art in my spare time, including perusing art related blogs and attending classes. The thing that intrigues me is how much overlap I find between some of those topics and several aspects of what...
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Part 2 of our TWiST podcast now posted
SoftwareTestPro.com has posted part 2 of the interview that Matt Heusser did with Heather and I for the TWiST podcast. This time, I talk more about the automation I’m working on and about what was then...
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Observation, or How to Steal Like an Artist, Testing redux
I came across a citation the other day for the blog post “How to Steal Like an Artist (and 9 other things nobody told me)“, by Austin Kleon. Given my feeling that some artists get way too possessive of...
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Test Automation Architecture: Our Application Under Test
After looking around a little to figure out what would be a good web application to use as the public example of my planned series digging deep into a test automation architecture, I’ve hit on the...
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My Selenium Conference talk video now posted!
The video from my talk at this year’s Selenium Conference is now posted on YouTube. You can watch it here. I haven’t watched it yet, but I know we ran into some technical difficulties recording the...
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Guest Post: .Net Headless browser options
Jim Evans is one of the committers for the Selenium project. He works a lot with the .Net bindings and the support for Internet Explorer. He sent out a post today to the selenium-developers mailing...
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Advice on starting browser-based automation
On the Selenium-Users mailing list today, I got asked what recommendations I would give to a team just starting browser automation with Selenium on an agile project that had been running for 6 months....
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I have office hours now!
I’ve decided to try an experiment. For at least the next month, I’m going to hold virtual office hours. Right now, they’re from 3-4PM Central Time on Fridays. Each hour is split into 3 sessions of 20...
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STP.Con Spring 2013 Keynote 1 Notes
It’s time for another conference and I’m going to try posting notes again. I’m at STP.Con in San Diego (a place with far, far less snow than home right now). This morning started off with keynotes from...
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#STPCon Spring 2013 – Jane Fraser, Become an Influential Tester
Another mindmap from STP.Con. This one captures Jane Fraser’s excellent talk on ways to gain (and lose) influence. Earlier I was in Mike Lyle’s talk around test management, but I didn’t get a chance to...
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Experiential Learning (TestRetreat 2013)
I’m at TestRetreat today in Madison, WI. A bunch of smart people here (some of whom I’ve met before, some I’ve known through online interactions, and some I’m having the pleasure of meeting for this...
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Measuring Context-Driven Testing (TestRetreat 2013)
The second session I was at at TestRetreat was one I facilitated around the visual representation of testing information. I’ll do a post on that later this weekend when I have time to type up the 5...
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Visualization in Testing (TestRetreat 2013)
The second session yesterday was the one I facilitated on visualization of testing information. I’ve recently started taking an interest in this – reading books by Nathan Yau and Stephen Few, with...
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Why I practice testing
Practice makes perfect is the old saw that we have all heard before, but we know there is no such thing as perfect testing. So what do I practice related to testing and why do I think it is...
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New Testers and Awe of “Experts”
I have been doing a lot of interviews in the last year for permanent and consultant testers and one question I always ask is who they follow in blogs or who they have read to learn about and improve...
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TestRetreat 2013 – The Rest of my Mindmaps
The last 3 sessions I was in resulted in smaller mindmaps. I was mentally processing more information and thus didn’t capture everything. I’m going to combine all three mindmaps into a single...
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Feast or Famine: why the posts are flowing now….
I’m pondering why it seems so easy to pump out blog posts today, the day after TestRetreat and the day before CAST 2013. Here are my first impressions: It’s easy to forget that people are interested in...
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Getting out of our own way as Testers, part 1: changing the metaphor for bugs
In my presentation at CAST 2013, I will be talking about some non-traditional things that the best testers I know do, using material from TED talks, biographies, and various fields of research. Because...
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Jesse Schell’s Lenses of Game Design and Testers
When I’m not doing my professional tasks, one of the things I like to do is to play board games- things like Puerto Rico and The Castles of Burgundy. From time to time, I’ve dabbled with the idea of...
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TAOGD Lenses: Lens #1 “The Lens of Essential Experience”
In the my earlier post, I talked about Jesse Schell‘s book, “The Art of Game Design”, promising to go lens by lens through the book. This is the first post looking at a lens. More to come!Jesse...
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TAOGD Lenses: Lens #2 “The Lens of Surprise”
This post is a continuation of the series examining the lenses of game design described by Jesse Schell in his book The Art of Game Design. Previous posts in this series can be found here. Surprise is...
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I believe…
We’ll resume the Art of Game Design series shortly (with a far smaller gap than between lenses #1 & 2), but first an interlude.I mentioned in the last post that I had recently done some training...
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TAOGD Lenses: Lens #3 “The Lens of Fun”
This post is a continuation of the series examining the lenses of game design described by Jesse Schell in his book The Art of Game Design. Previous posts in this series can be found here. Fun is...
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More thoughts
Over lunch today, we (the vettest team) started discussing the event so far. I asked Brian what types of things we needed to be doing to meet the goal he stated on the first day of this being a...
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Day 3 wrap-up
You may have noticed that I’m blogging less and less on each day. Some of this is because the planning and procedural stuff is becoming less emphasized as we work more on getting a story done. While I...
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On exploratory testing
Cem and James talked about exploratory testing — Cem talked about exploratory testing in terms of categorizing knowledge — by risk, test technique, or approach. Though I wasn’t there, from other...
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Day 5
Stories for Rublog project:Article synopsesTrace packageAT HarnessSearchHook up tester.rbArchive bug reportsUpdate change logBUG: Number of articles varies with navigationWe also identified several...
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Metrics in XP
This post is in more of a notes style than my previous ones. I was originally planning on making this more prose-like, but I’m not going to after all. I kind of like the way it reads now. Maybe it’ll...
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Observations
Tonight we spent the after dinner session taking a first crack at describing what we’ve learned from the session so far. I imagine we’ll be revisiting the topic again in the next couple of days, but...
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Day 6
We discussed a little more testing this morning. I was still waking up, but here’s what I pulled out as key points in the discussion: * End to end tests put the other tests in context * 3 categories of...
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BC’s thoughts on Ruby
BC posted a writeup over on her livejournal about her thoughts on Ruby after this week. Her post also makes me remember that none of my LJ friends show up on my blogroll…. need to do something about...
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More observations
* Brian observed that it was interesting pairing because it seemed that at any given moment he wasn’t as confident in the code and his understanding of the code as it has historically been on his own...
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Dinner conversations
A few tidbits from dinner conversations: First, a couple of nights ago, Bret was talking about psychological barriers that hold us back. The example he gave was that maybe he wasn’t as successful as a...
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Quotes from nearby
“Can you put a lizard in your head? Yes. Is putting a lizard in your head better than cheese?” “We’re all zombies on a train” “So, we’re not actually using the brains we have now” “So, in addition to...
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Guest post from James Bach
One of the things that I (Andy) don’t feel like I conveyed well in this blog is some of the conflict that came out in our discussions. I think my failure in this regard stemmed from two pieces — the...
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Wrap-up
Cem prepared this list to help us discuss the outcome of this workshop. We spent this morning discussing and refining it (with John moderating, which I mention so that he can get his Toastmaster’s...
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Naked/Ironman CRC
Michael F. gave us a demo of what he calls “Naked CRC” or “Ironman CRC”. This is a technique that he uses to explain systems visually, using motion and spatial relationships. It’s a bit hard to explain...
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And so it (temporarily) ends
This is the last post I’ll be making from Front Royal. Those who may have gotten used to multiple posts a day will find themselves sadly disappointed in the upcoming months. There’ll be no posts for...
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Another reason for why I’m in grad school
Higher education or a larger brain may protect against dementia, according to new findings by researchers from the University of South Florida and the University of Kentucky. [Science Blog]I knew...
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A step back
In looking back, I realized that I dove into several topics here without any real explanation of why I was doing it. For those of you reading who have not been present at FIT since the day I arrived,...
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Context-free Questions
Last week, I gave a presentation on exploratory testing at the Twin Cities Quality Assurance Association. It was the same paper that I gave at STAR East in May, with some stuff that I learned in giving...
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Compendium of Idea Generation Techniques
In my Exploring Exploratory Testing talk, I mentioned a web site run by Martin Leith that contained a taxonomy of Idea generation Techniques. Renee Hopkins (of Corante’s IdeaFlow blog) just reported...
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Disproportionate amount of introverts in software testing
My wife and I were talking the other day about my learning styles research. She observed that it seemed to her that most testers tend to be more introverted than extroverted. While I don’t have the...
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*bzzt* *bzzt* Resuming broadcasting…
It’s been two months since I last posted here. I got out of the habit about the time that I left MN to go back down to FL for the school year, and have been playing catch up ever since. It’s been...
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Selenium Conference 2011 wrap-up
Selenium Conference 2011 is over and done with for the year. I had a great time, and want to thank everyone who made it such a success. I think the biggest takeaway for me is that I need to switch over...
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Mind mapping the Selenium Conference 2011
In a tweet she made from the Selenium Conference, Marlena Compton stated that I had mind mapped all my notes from the conference. She asked for a picture at the time, which I gave by taking a screen...
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Test Automation Architecture intro
As promised, I’m working on a series of posts digging deeper into the architecture I started describing at the Selenium Conference a couple of weeks ago. I had hoped that the videos of the talk would...
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How development debt becomes a Hydra
Hydra (by Eva the Weaver @ Flickr)When we talk about “technical debt” it seems to convey the idea that you are creating an obligation to fix things later that will behave nicely and predictably, like...
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