Testing the Waterhouse

The other night I was bathing my 2 kids, and they wanted me to read them a story. My daughter chose a book on time and clocks (I can't remember the name of the book right now), so I sat down and began to read it to them as they had a bath. It was full of interesting stuff (to them at least), it would explain what can happen in different time-frames. One of the examples it gave was for 1 minute. It said: In 1 minute a Cheetah can run around a race track 4 times This is pretty cool, highlighting how quick a Cheetah actually is. Now the tester in me, instantly thought "well depends how long the race track is, I'm pretty sure it's talking about a 400m race track - but still it should be clear"... Then my son, as if he is reading my mind says "It depends how long a race track is"... I looked at him and said "You're right! It does depend on how long the race track is!" Why am I talking about this? How does it relate to Testing? Well ...

Gareth Southgate has impressed me massively over the past few weeks. The empathy and compassion he has shown to other players, the way he has made this tournament about the team and not about any individual is amazing. I was reading the #GarethSouthgateWould hashtags on Twitter and there were some classics in there. I'll let you read them for yourselves, but I thought it would be cool to make it themed towards testing, here are some I came up with off the top of my head... Though I am sure there are more. #GarethSouthgateWould - Ensure that automated checks clean up after themselves #GarethSouthgateWould - Share with other testers blogs and articles they have read that they enjoyed #GarethSouthgateWould - go through and remove any Thread.Sleeps from any automated checks #GarethSouthgateWould - Take time out to help another tester who is struggling with something, even when he doesn't know the solution. It made me realise that these are all things that a carin...

As of last Friday, another Tech Develops day is in the books! It was an absolutely epic day, in true ASOS fashion (no pun intended) they just keep getting better and better! I had my special Tech Develops T-Shirt on and was ready to go! I started off with hosting some 99 Second Talks, where we had ADMs, QAs and Developers talking for (you guessed it!) 99 seconds about topic(s) that they are passionate about! It didnt' even have to be Tech Related, we had one person talking about their love of Pugs, and what made this extraordinary was he joined the company just 3 days ago as a Princes Trust graduate! I don't think I would have had the confidence to have done something similar, so massive respect for that! We had a talk about Conversational E-Commerce and what the future holds in that space, I spoke about Checking & Testing in a nice little poem that I'd created the night before (I felt massive pressure following the "success" of The Stickman Teste...

As some of you may have seen, a little while ago I performed a 99 second talk on the Stickman Tester for the Ministry of Testing. Owing to the fact that it had to be 99 seconds, this unfortunately meant that a verse was left out in order to keep it within the time frame! It's only now that I have found the time to put the deleted verse/scene back in, and re-record it and upload it! (It's now a 120 second talk!) It talks about a testers journey in an Agile team, about how not everybody has it as good as others, and basically talks about not giving up, keep searching, or trying to change your role to make it what you want it to be. Anyway, here it is, in all it's glory. Hope you enjoy it!

I was at a football coaching session the other night, and some other coaches put on a training session for us, so that we could learn and critique it. This is not an easy thing to do, to put something on for your peers and open yourself up to criticism is a difficult thing to do. One of the comments from the president of the club was that in order to develop yourself you need to push yourself and step outside of your comfort zone which it was evident that these coaches were doing. I took this to heart in many ways, a few weeks ago I signed up to do a presentation at a meetup that was only a couple of meetups old, The QE Roundabout . I was in contact with Zoe Canning (the event organiser) and I knew it was something I wanted to do, but it's like anything, saying you want to do something and then putting yourself in a position to do it are sometimes two very different things. Anyway, I volunteered to do one, the theme was Automation & Architecture, and we were free to ta...

Working in Tech, it can be difficult to find the time to further improve yourself, you're focused a lot on delivery, and it can be hard to drag yourself away from it and spend time on delivering an improved you. This is why some companies are starting to have time dedicated to your personal development, where people drop tools and do a personal project or watch some tutorials. Luckily working at ASOS we get the last Friday of every month to focus on this! Last Friday we held what we call a "Tech Develops" day, where as an employee of ASOS and working in Technology, In the week running up to it we decided it would be a good idea to have a platform where people could stand up and perform a 99 Second Talk about anything they please. We had 12 people sign up to it, and we had talks ranging from the technical (Git-Bisect) to a Conference review (UKStar). The first talk was an informative talk about Git Bisect and how it's used and why because of it, it's import...

I've seen many blog posts about people posting about what they learnt by going to TestBash. It made me think about what I have learnt by NOT going to TestBash this year.... Firstly, I attended TestBash Brighton last year. I loved it, I learnt so much and came back passionate and engaged with the Testing Community. Over the course of the year however, my work changed significantly and I wasn't doing as much testing as I was before. When TestBash came around this year, I had 3 QAs who asked about going. I said to them "Definitely go", we got the funding and got them tickets and off they went. I don't think they realised why I was so passionate about them going, and about how I was "gutted" that I wasn't going! So with 3 of the QAs who I work with being there, I was in constant communication with them, checking in on how it was going, what cool things have they learnt... They even brought me back an MoT Calendar and some TestSphere Cards! But th...