Testing the Waterhouse

I was reading my good friend Helen Meeks blog on her end of year review, and thought I'd do something similar... It's been a long year, but an exciting and definitely positive one for me on both a professional and a personal front. As I write this I have been up for 2 hours with a crying baby, but strangely I still see her as a positive! I'll start with the professional positives, as that's what people come here for, to hear about my views on my profession, I'm not sure they're so interested to hear how many nappies I changed at the weekend etc... The biggest positive for me has to be my promotion to QA Lead, I've been striving for this promotion for a long time, and to finally get it was extremely exciting for me. It meant that I can influence people more and effect how they work and to try and make them work better and more effectively. It also means I get to work with more technologies and more teams, which I've wanted to do for a long time. ...

With Christmas upon us, I thought it might be good to write a Christmas themed testing article.  How could you achieve that you are probably asking? You might be of the opinion that working in IT and Christmas are 2 entirely different things, but I’m not sure I’d agree with that, so I would like to compare the build up to Christmas as a parent and how it compares to the build up to a release of a piece of software, and the similarities between the two. Firstly, for any release of a product, or any Christmas purchasing has occurred, as a tester or as a parent, you like to know what the business or the children want, for the software release this will come in the form of requirements and in the form of children, this will probably be a nicely written letter to Santa!  Childs letter to Santa/Requirements for a User Story...  both want the world, but neither will get it. You could argue that both will have holes in them, and missing requirements, or gifts that are...