Test management for Lean extremists

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I get grey hairs with Lean enthusiasts, or better yet extremists. I'm concerned about their obsession to see "waste" everywhere and remove it, "waste" being any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer. Quite often these people target testing activities too. By over-simplifying these activities Lean extremists justify the elimination of them.

Usually they do a half-ass job. So I, or actually Michael Bolton has created a test management process for these poor people.

BBST Foundations 2.0 recap

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So, I hopped to the BBST bandwagon and attended Foundations 2.0 certification program. The four week course was an eye-opening trip I will never forget. And now, few days after finalizing the course, I'd like to reflect on what happened. With the intent of not revealing too much to those who are about to take the course, of course. ;)

Breaking the boundaries of familiar

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It's about time I wrote a blog post. :) Once again there has been a turmoil of everything and this blog has gotten unfortunately low priority among this everything.

But enough about that. I'm boiling with ideas. One of them being the idea behind a tweet I wrote just a moment ago:

This pretty much culminates my values in testing at this moment. But I agree, it requires some explaining. So let's get to that explanation part then.

Fortune cookie about test cases

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In my desperate quest for releasing blog content I came up with this idea; Fortune cookies that tell words of wisdom, vague prophecies, mystic "truths" and even best practices to those who don't know better.

An omen

The reason why I'm not putting these solely on Twitter is because I want to ponder the meaning of these fortunes, with only just few phrases to keep the mystic vibe on. And of course I want to provoke discussion. Twitter is wonderful medium for releasing fortunes themselves, but for ponderment, discussion and other lenghty activities it's just too limited.

So get your zen and milk ready! It's fortune cookie time!

Mging ET w/ QC, LOL!!1

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Ok, tons of thoughts and ideas swimming in my head again. I've written lengthy texts about building trust, product risk analysis, cool heuristics like FPS Nausea, test cases, how to gain by losing, gaming testers, etc. All at alpha level still. All complete s**t still. The highest priority is however the recap about my experiences at recent Rapid Testing Intensive / Critical Thinking courses, held none other than the almighty James Bach himself.

Well, the highest priority was that. Namely somehow my approach on managing exploratory testing with QC has gotten some attention lately. Perhaps it's because I'm actually training it now, finally. Perhaps it's because I've ranted about it more in Twitter and other mediums. Or perhaps it's because factory schoolers have grown tired of me ranting about borderline philosophical things about testing and thinking like a tester, and are finally demanding something tangible to mimic.

I don't know.

The actual reason I'm writing this is firstly the interest of some of the testers I greatly respect namely Maaret Pyhäjärvi, Aleksis Tulonen, Huib Schoots and Paul Carvalho. I've managed ET and teams doing ET with QC for some time now, but I've never actually gotten any peer reviews of my actions. I've roamed relatively blindly and I hope this blog post cures that.

But secondly and no less importantly I'm hoping others will get ideas how to manage ET either with QC or with other tools as well. The idea is basically the same with every tool.

So let's get crackin'!

Note: I made a summary paragraph and it can be found at the very end of this post. So if you're a member of the sales division or otherwise suffer from attention deficiencies, you can skip right into it... ;)

It's judgment time!

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I came to wonder about oracles in testing. Or more likely got bewildered. You see, I read Cem Kaner's article about this subject and was totally lost when I hit the paragraph "Oracles are Heuristics".

Oracles and heuristics started to blur! I started this post as an attempt to cure my bewilderment via deeper analysis about the article and the thinking behind it, but then shifted to my focus on something much more interesting, namely passing judgment on people.

It's a dangerous path to take, but I took it. Let's see how it went...

Managing Expectations

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I've started several posts, six to be exact, one being a follow-up to my first episode of Building A Tester series, but I cannot complete any of them. My Achilles' Heel.

So I started a new one! :D

It's about an epiphany of what Jon Bach tweeted about the deeper meaning of Pass/Fail testing and how it's tied to one of the three phrases a Sogeti consultant should always remember. It's about promises, wishes and fulfillment their of. It's about managing expectations.

Learning About English and Using Condoms aka Building a Tester Via Video Games - part I

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I've ranted a lot about how I feel about the world of testing today, foamed about exploratory testing, defamed bad practises, pissed people off, hopefully helped some too. All has revolved around recent happenings, fresh phenomenas, hip and cool, but nothing about the past. Nothing about the reasons why I'm here, doing the things I do as a tester. It's about time to change that.

I've decided to start a series about building a tester. Something about what makes a person to become a tester, what ignites the passion towards it, what drives this passion onwards and how it's fueled by the very basics of a human nature.

This is a story of how I was built to be a tester.

NTD2012 roundup - day 2

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Day 2 round up of one of the warmest and friendliest conferences I've ever been in. Nordic Testing Days 2012, baby!

As I stated in my previous post, I missed the beginning of the day 2. Good company and alcoholic beverages are just something that makes me want to press snooze button few more times than usual in the next morning. Plus that breakfast was something else! Kudos, Meriton Grand Hotel!

Mr. Nice Guy in action ;)

Ok, I missed "only" the keynote of Rex Black, but as we seem to believe in different things professionally, I guess it's ok... ;) I had a chance to talk with Rex off-duty and it seems that he's a really nice guy with fashinating stories about his career and personal life. We chatted about testing, economics and even jujutsu. I'm quite bewildered that he travels that much; Over 250 000 miles per year!! What?! On top of everything else, he oozes character. I bet if he chooses to say I'm a girl, I will belive him. I quess you kinda have to have character if you're selling ISTQB... :D

But let's get cracking. Time dig into the presentations/workshops I eventually did participate. Same rules as before; Lightning style, headlines hold the slides, stories are my thoughts about the subject, etc.

Go!

NTD2012 roundup - day 1

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It's been awhile. Again. Even though I'm working on three assignments and haven't got the time to write down all the ideas that are swarming in my mind, things are pretty awsome right now. Namely all of these assignments offer intellectual challenges I've been yearning for so long now; Quality management with some of the most brilliant developers I've ever worked with, testing center of excellence handyman activities in super friendly and responsive environment and a pretty sweet exploratory testing gig for even sweeter product...

Plus I'm getting married soon! Exciting times! \o/

But enough about the hype. Topic of today is Nordic Testing Days 2012 roundup, which unfortunately has been delayed due to the before mentioned reasons. I'm tackling these lightning style i.e. a very short summary about the subjects that touched my heart and mind, divided in two days as the conference itself. This lightning style is of course because of the latency, which have made me to forget things. Very familiar situation in software testing too... ;)

So, time to get tackling (click the headlines for presentation material)!