A little while ago I was asked about my experience and learnings from running workshops and what advice I have. I thought I’d share my thoughts on here. As a quick note up front, I am under no illusion that I’m not an expert and am still learning. I did also look into teaching as […]
Earlier this year I wrote about my changing role and push to help improve working practices and support my teams in testing. In terms of my role, it is certainly coming together. Over the past few weeks I’ve been getting involved more and more with teams and helping teams reflect on quality. My big win […]
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 […]
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 […]
Many people view testing as a checkbox exercise where you spend a chunk of time writing what you plan to test to verify the ACs (basically re-wording the ACs) and what you will regression test. This may be in test cases or tasks/comments on a story. Once reviewed/shared, the tester of the story would then […]
In a previous blog entry I talked about unit testing and how I’ve learnt from my (many) mistakes when writing unit tests and practices that I’ve seen that wind me up. Today I’d like to talk about how I’ve been writing unit tests recently, employing the ideas of TDD (test driven development), and some of […]
When I started working as a developer my mentor taught me to write unit tests with each changeset, so I did. After switching team, my new lead & mentor had us doing the same and I learnt new techniques to write more complex unit tests. When a couple of newer members joined the team, getting […]
You don’t need to understand code to make use of dump files. One tool that I’ve frequently used throughout my testing career (and also development) is WinDbg. I was a little surprised when I realised that very few other people use it so I thought that I’d share a little about why I use it […]