Testing the Waterhouse

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...

I'm thinking of creating a QA Community blog in my current workspace, you may ask why? What would be the benefits of this? I can think of a number of immediate benefits: - People within the Community will be more aware of what others are doing by their posts on there - People can more easily learn from one another, I feel that by writing up about something, even in a blog post you learn more about it yourself, and the people reading the blog post will also learn from it - It will encourage people who possibly hadn't thought about having their own blog to get involved and contribute There are also benefits for the wider community in that: - People will read it, and hopefully contribute to it outside of asos and offer insights into what might work better etc. - People will read it and want to be a part of it, and thus make the company a more attractive place to work The biggest hurdle I think will be actually getting people to contribute to it, once it is u...

I've been told in the past that I need to raise my profile within the QA community, not just in work but outside of work as well. I need to be more vocal and speak out more in work, and get people to know me, which I have started to do and am quite enjoying it. In light of this I want to offer advice to other people about how they can raise their profile within the QA community outside of their workplace, as well as in their workplace, as raising one will hopefully raise the other. Firstly, I never thought I would get into this blogging malarkey  but I can definitely say it has helped make me a better QA. Someone once said to me that blogging is useful as it might help someone learn something, and if not, then it can help you and is a good point of reference if you ever need to look back on anything. I also find it quite therapeutic by writing out about how I feel about certain aspects of my job. This will help raise your profile inside and outside of work, share your...