It was a beautiful spring in 2013. I was in the testing business for three years part-time and one-year full time: a good time for me to take a course in testing and consolidate what I was doing in practice. My testing mentors, Oana, Alex, and Ru, recommended the BBST courses. Two of them had… read more
Context În 2012 echipa noastră formată din patru Altomi a câștigat concursul Eurostar Team Star cu filmulețul “Creaturi ale testării” (EN: Creatures of Testing). Așa am ajuns să participăm la cea mai mare conferință din Europa dedicată testării software, care a avut loc în Amsterdam. Una dintre sesiunile la care am participat a fost “Crearea… read more
At the end of January 2020, I attended the Dutch Exploratory Workshop on Testing. The particular format made this gathering different from what I experienced before. For details, I recommend going through the handbook developed by LAWST – Los Altos Workshop on Software Testing, and Paul Holland’s blog post on facilitation (with K-Cards). In a… read more
I felt honored to have been invited to facilitate the Test Lab at STAREAST. Being my first Lab at this particular conference, I was lucky to have Bart Knaack, James Lyndsay and Wade Wachs there to ramp me up. They told me about their experiences with the Lab at STAREAST and gave me valuable insights from their personal kit of lessons learned. Their input helped me change the regular approach I had when running other Labs at EuroSTAR and BTD. Once again, context wins over pre-established “how to”s.
The Continuous Integration and Testing Conference, abbreviated as CITCON, is an OpenSpace non-profit conference which for ten years has been organized in various cities around the globe. Currently, each year there are four editions taking place on four continents: Europe, America, Asia and Australia & New Zealand. The previous editions in Europe took place in London, Brussels, Amsterdam, Paris, London again, Budapest, Turin, Zagreb, Helsinki and this year in Cluj-Napoca.
This November I attended the EuroSTAR Conference. The conference takes place once a year in different cities of Europe, and gathers around thousand people interested in testing. I was involved in running the Test Lab. Further on I will write about the Test Lab, in general and this year’s EuroSTAR Test Lab in particular, and then in the second part I’ll share how I felt at the conference and my takeaways. I will also insert the names and twitter handles of testers connected to the topics of this blog post, because I think that being aware of the ideas shared outside our workplace bubble, plays an important role in our career development.
The week starting with October 26th I attended the courses Rapid Software Testing (3 days) and Rapid Software Testing for Managers (1 day). It was brilliant! I feel I learned so many from both the course material and the trainer James Bach. Further on I’ll detail three things I learned and find valuable, and also mention other things I loved in this course.
I’ve been thinking about how to approach the subject of “Bad habits during testing activities”.
This concept of bad habits was very abstract to me and no bad or good habit came to my mind no matter how much I struggled. Then an idea hit me. How about I put myself in the context of testing something and observe my habits while I test? I may not pass through all the testing activities with this exercise, but it is a good starting point.
I’ll think about the test activities I had yesterday. Let’s see. Yesterday I did pair testing with my colleague Raluca. We were supposed to test a pretty straightforward feature, but the setup to get there was a bit tricky.
The other days I was reading a very interesting book “Lessons Learned in Software Testing: A Context-Driven Approach – by Cem Kaner, James Bach and Bret Pettichord”.
I sketched some lessons that I found very interesting, mainly from the first two chapters “The role of the tester” and “Thinking like a tester”. Enjoy!
I learned a lot of things this Citcon. For those who haven’t got the chance to be part of a Continuous Integration and Testing Conference, below’s a diagram illustrating how it works.