Testing the Waterhouse

I recently (though it seems a long time ago now... as I've just got round to writing this!) had the pleasure of attending the Unicom - 12th NextGen Testing Conference in London, I was lucky in that I won free tickets, so a free conference is definitely appealing! :) I thought it would be good to write a blog post detailing the conference, what I learnt, what I got out of it and if I enjoyed it... The conference itself was chaired by Donald Firesmith , he was over from Pittsburgh, and was chairing the conference and also giving a talk about the Many Types of Testing & Testing Philosophies. Many Types of Testing & Testing Philosophies This was a very interesting talk, and possibly one of my favourites, it opened my eyes a bit, and I've been in testing for 8 years, but there were some types of testing in there that I had not heard about, and even some that I knew of that weren't included (which I had a chat with Donald about afterwards and agreed that they shou...

We were in a meeting the other day, and someone in the meeting, said something that is one of my pet hates, "It's not my job" ... This confused me, we are talking about delivering quality software as part of a team, and anyway that someone can add value in that team to deliver the ultimate goal is important, regardless of what their job title is. This then lead me to think about how testing has changed over the past 5 years, and how I see it as a constantly evolving role, and it reminded me of something that I read about recently and wanted to blog about called Holocracy , it is about a method of running organizations and so it's given me a kick up the backside and here's the blog post.  It has some core principles, and these are: Flexible Organisation Structure - With Clear Roles defined around the work and not about the people. People can often take on a number of Roles in a company.... More Autonomy to Teams & Individuals - Teams and individuals solv...

We recently held a community session where we completed a little exercise to get people to think about the different layers of testing, and the different types of testing in the hope that it would get their brains thinking and applying it to real life scenarios in their project and team work. The exercise was one we had done before many years ago, but seeing as we had new starters, and not many people left from all those years ago, I felt it would be appropriate and useful to do it again. It was to take a set of instructions for the assembly of a chair and look at the different types of tests that we could apply to it to ensure it worked as expected. The instructions were these: It was a pairing exercise, to carry on the theme from previous sessions, and to get people collaboratively working together with people they might not normally work with, and I gave them the instructions and told them how would they test it, what types of tests would they perform and where. I was exp...