Can do!

Heyhey!

I watched Apollo 13 for the Nth time yesterday. There's a lot to like in that movie. Good script, great acting, memorable characters, etc. Also the original story is highly appealing. I think the movie manages to capture it quite nicely, but it's still quite impossible for us common people to really understand what happened during that mission. The amazing feats the astronauts and the mission control managed to conjure under the crisis go beyond imagination.

One of the most remarkable things was the spacecraft. The product that was designed to successfully transport three people to the moon and back, and that could do so much more. It inspired me to think, write this post and tweet too... :)

Harder or smarter?

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We Finns are a nation of hard workers. Since childhood we've been taught that it's the hard work that pays off. Our Lutheran heritage, wartime hardships and long periods of darkness are just a number of reasons why we think through is the only way "past the grey rock" (Finnish saying).

The problem is that we're no longer grinding ship axles, cutting wood or even building mobile phones. It's not about muscle and punch clocks anymore. It's about brain and around the clock now.

If we fail to understand this, we'll work ourselves to death.

Refining history

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I love Hannibal TV series. It's something you don't want to watch while in delicate mental state or eating, but other than that I think it's finally something that meets the level of quality that the legacy of Hannibal Lecter deserves and raises the bar (almost) to the height where it was after Silence of the Lambs.

Speaking of quality, in one the latest episodes of Hannibal Dr. Lecter stated: "It's the distinction that adds an expectation of quality." This is something that attracted my attention to the extent of writing this blog post.

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.