From a professional viewpoint, it has been an interesting and largely enjoyable year – despite a huge setback.
I’ve done quite a lot of cool things:
- Created a course for the Ministry of Testing!
- Piloted layered acceptance tests based upon examples within refinement.
- Had teams doing interesting user journey testing using personas.
- Continued to improve our approach to collaborative test strategy and RCAs.
- Held 1:1s with developers to talk quality & challenges.
- Attended MoTaCon and Leading with Quality.
- Attended local meetups, including Scottish Testing Group.
- Got back into blogging.
- AI testing helper based upon risk in a hackathon
- Even done some development!
I’ve also been able to start a few interesting things:
- A research project into education and how new engineers learn to build quality software.
- I’m part way through my STEC certification (taking me a while!).
- Building a portfolio on GitHub (still a WIP).
With that in mind, I have to feel like it has been a good year.
That said, ultimately I’m not working right now and the year hasn’t been without its challenges. I often felt underwhelmed by what I achieved – it wasn’t transformative.
Ultimately I failed to convince people that quality needed to be a priority. This was in an environment where quality is the number one challenge, so that really is demotivating. I failed so badly that my team abandoned having quality specialists. Ouch.
Since then, coping with redundancy hasn’t been easy. I thought I’d take time out but quickly felt uncomfortable with that and have been job hunting more and more. I spoke about this in a 99 second talk (and may share that in a blog post in the new year) but there’s a form of grief from losing your job. A loss of structure, identity and people.
That all said, I haven’t let it dent my confidence. I believe in myself. I have a lot to offer and in the not too distant future, someone will benefit from that.
I’m excited by what 2026 has to offer. My core hope is to finally explore something beyond the video security sector where I’ve been for the past 14 years. Whether that has me revisiting roots, empowered by new ideas from STEC, talks & books, or leading a group in a new sector, it excites me.