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 […]
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 […]
I’ve had a fairly varied career and in 2019 I took the unusual step of going from a developer to a manual tester. I’m glad that I made this choice and this post explores why.
I believe this is a fairly common thing to do and hopefully useful for myself. Lets have a look back at the bizarre year that was 2021. Key events: Officially became an employee of Motorola Solutions, following a takeover last year. Moved to a new office, which I visited a handful of times. Started a […]
I am a test engineer at my current work. After watching a number of talks at Ministry of Testing I also signed up for a secondary role; Cyber Champion. Through this role I’ve been learning about many aspects of cyber security and then running brown bags for our office to help people learn more about […]
Before I begin, I have spent several years as a software engineer and was decent enough at it. As part of this I would write my own automated tests. Since switching to test, I’ve developed a host of handy test tools, developed simulators and even made my own automation tool that used our SDKs to […]
Often a user story, PBI or whatever can include a number of alternate paths, scanerios or examples. The team has ideally listed them during backlog refinement and 3As. When a diligent software engineer picks up the item, they can write their automatic acceptance tests and also provide manual testing as well, listing the testing in […]
In modern development we have many layers of automated testing and there’s manual functional and exploratory testing. We’re shifting testing further and further left to catch things early – ideally before a line of code is written. So why do so many applications that we use day-to-day have bugs? Why aren’t we as members of […]
Over the years I have seen an increase in the idea of not reporting defects within Jira, Azure DevOps, Bugzilla etc and having a conversation instead. If it is an issue within the story itself and an AC failure then I certainly see the merit in skipping the bug report. It can be busy work […]