Coaching, mentoring and job search support for software testers and QA/QE
October 21, 2024
An update: It’s a tough job market right now, so I’m offering help with job hunting, resumes, CVs, career planning and mentoring. I’ve been working as a tester for some 30 years and in agile environments since around 2003, in a variety of hands-on and leadership roles. Send me a message either through this site […]
Enterprise test strategies for traditional organisations
July 2, 2023
Continuing my posts on strategy, here’s a new example outline of how I’ve recently approached test strategy for larger, traditional organisations, transititioning to DevOps. It contains a lot of items that would be aspirational for some places, but also creates a view of something quite achievable that fits with typical change management systems you’ll find […]
Organisational-level test strategies and modern approaches – Some thoughts-in-progress
May 9, 2023
In a recent role I was given permission to share some of my test strategy work publicly. It was largely generic in nature, given its high-level focus, so I’m pleased to be able to share a bunch of notes that may help others orient to the rapidly-changing landscape. What’s not here, and which I *should* include, […]
On UI test automation
May 10, 2018
In a recent Twitter interaction, I was pushing Alan Page to clarify a key poing on his anti-UI-automation thread. I didn’t get it, and there have been a few more responses such that I wanted to make my current thinking and position clear. I tweeted this as well, but here’s the thread for those not […]
Better BDD – a Javascript Protractor experiment – Building a test framework organically
August 17, 2016
So almost two years in to my test manager role, I seem to have freed up time to get back on the tools somewhat. While there are a huge number of problems to solve, I first decided to have a look at protractor for a few reasons: I didn’t feel we were getting much value […]
How to write a test strategy
June 20, 2016
I’ve documented my overall approach to rapid, lightweight test strategy before but thought it might be helpful to post an example. If you haven’t read the original post above, see that first. This is the a sanitised version of the first I ever did, and while there are some concessions to enterprise concerns, it mostly […]
Tools for thinking about context – Agile sliders reimagined
June 3, 2016
Philosophically, I’m aligned to the context-driven testing view of the world. Largely, this is influenced by a very early awareness of contextual factors to success in my first job, and the wild difference between games testing and corporate testing roles that I had. Since 2003, the work of the context-driven school founders has been a […]
Why record-playback (almost) never works and why almost nobody is using it anyway
June 1, 2016
Alister Scott once again calls out a number of spot-on technical points regarding the use of automation tools. In this case, he discusses record/playback automation tools. Technical reasons aside, we also need to look at the non-technical reasons. I’ve only once encountered someone trying to rely on the record-playback feature of an automation tool (my […]
Testing does not prevent defects
May 24, 2016
There seems to be a bunch of discussion regarding whether testers prevent defects or not. The main source of confusion that I see is confusing ‘testers’ with ‘testing’. Clearing this up seems pretty simple. Testing does not prevent defects. Testers may. I do. But I don’t call that part of my work ‘testing’, even if […]
September 23, 2015
This blog post regarding test code being harder than application code was passed around the office, and I thought I would preserve my response here. You’ll need to read it first for this to make much sense. I think there’s a reasonable point that testing is frequently trivialised, but I don’t think saying that the […]