Testing the Waterhouse

Apologies for the lack of updates, it's been a busy week, had my 3 year wedding anniversary last week, so was busy sorting stuff out for that, and had a bit of a hectic weekend! :) Anyway, I've recently been reading a lot about mindmaps, and how they are useful when brainstorming and coming up with areas that may or may not need testing when a story/pbi comes in. I started to wonder what the fuss was about, so I recently created a MindMap for a recent blog post here  and found it extremely useful. So let me go over how they work, and then I'll explain how I personally find them helpful and hopefully you will too. They are an extremely simple concept, you have your theme in the middle and off of that branches anything that you think is related or want to investigate, and then you can have branches off of them too... And so on... I find that the mind will naturally flow from one area to the next, and you won't have to think too hard and you won't forget im...

Where I am at currently, we are recruiting a high number of new QA and it seems that every QA meeting there is a new face, and sometimes more than one. I'm beginning to think how can we make them feel welcome, and at the same time how can we keep some form of team spirit. So in no particular order... Firstly, to ensure that they feel welcome it's important to have things set up and ready for them to use from their first day. This can be anything from hardware, to user permissions to even providing them with a notebook and pen. I've seen it all too often, and experienced it myself on some occasions, turning up to my first day in a new role, and not having a pc, and on one occasion not even having a desk. In order to feel part of a company, and welcome, then it is extremely important that the company is ready for you to start, not only from a financial aspect (ie. you sitting around doing nothing and getting paid, generally isn't productive for the company), but I love ...