I’ve been working on my TestBash UK 2023 talk and one of the slides touches upon how I identify as a tester and the tag line on this site. I find bugs. This may be an interesting topic to explore because not only have I barely entered any bugs so far this year (largely because […]
Revenge of the Gatekeeper For the past couple of months I’ve spent half my time, which is in itself reduced following complications, as a “QA Champion”. A title I dislike. In particular I dislike how QA tends to be associated with the testing best described as “checking” and “QA monkeys” running “test scripts”. The organisation […]
During my time as a developer I generally produced a good quality of work. My knowledge of design patterns may not have been very good but I tested my stuff to ensure that it did what I expected it to and that is why there was generally a low bug count for my work… But […]
The importance of developing secure software is (hopefully) understood but what about our working practices? Many, if not most of us will be familiar with navigating IT restrictions. Firewalls, limits on what you can install or automatically deleting anything that isn’t digitally signed from an approved source. All these impediments to us working. Perhaps, like […]
I am writing this from a dark place. That isn’t my solution to rising energy prices, but instead from the loss of my wife. I mention this as I think it is relevant to the changes that my career has taken and what I want to talk about today. Change can be hard. It is […]
When I first started testing within the games industry we would perform general “destructive testing”. This basically meant there was no specific work so we went off to find bugs (or slack off). I liked to pick on a particular area and would explore that and the behaviours, looking for any little nuances. Over the […]
Over the past 2 years and the past year in particular I have been learning about cyber security. Whilst I have spoken a lot about threat modeling and even created my own card game (see threatagentsgame.com), I have also been learning a wider area. I recently took part in a tournament by Secure Flag (courtesy […]
In late September I attended my first in person testing conference, TestBash UK. I’ve previously been to online events, in person agile and development conferences and an alternative style event – TestBashX Edinburgh, but this was especially exciting. I was attending as a speaker. Life Goals Now before I talk more on my actual experience […]
I started as a manual QA tester for a games company back in 2008 as part of a massive team, very disconnected from developers. Since then I’ve worked in smaller test teams, within feature teams (i.e. server software) and within a scrum team. This includes a chunk of time where I was the developer, with […]
As I reflect upon my career and what the future might hold, it made sense to consider my strengths but I realised that I should also think about my weaknesses. In terms of hard skills, I know that the fact that the nature of the software that I’ve worked on means that I don’t have […]