A Pocket Guide to Beta Testing – Part 2

A couple of weeks back I posted a blog on how to set up a Beta testing phase, based on resources I found online a couple of years back. In this post I continue with the second stage of Beta testing, Onboarding the Testers, focusing on giving the right amount of information to the testers […]

A Pocket Guide to Beta Testing – Part 1

A couple of years back, a team I was coaching wanted to organise a Beta testing phase for their newly developed product. Since I personally never set-up such an activity, I created a guide for them based on material I found online plus company specific information. Now, as a product owner, I want to try […]

First Challenges as a New Product Owner

Imagine it’s your first day at a new school and you are asked to join the basketball team as their captain and coach. Everyone is playing along nicely when you show up, the new kid. You have been playing basketball for some time but you never had any decision making position before. And now here […]

Quotes & Notes on “Agile Testing Condensed: A Brief Introduction” by Janet Gregory and Lisa Crispin

The book: Agile Testing Condensed: A Brief Introduction The authors: Janet Gregory & Lisa Crispin Collaborative testing practices that occur continuously, from inception to delivery and beyond, supporting frequent delivery of value for our customers. Testing activities focus on building quality into the product, using fast feedback loops to validate our understanding. The practices strengthen […]

Keeping Up with Compliance in a DevOps World

This post first appeared at the DevTestOps community on October 4, 2019. About 5 years ago I was working in a small product that was doing (almost) everything the DevOps way. We had the works: code and tests versioned in git, trunk based development, building the code once (more or less), feature toggles, daily deployments, […]

Some Ideas for Reducing “Release Decision” Time

“Can we release this feature?” is usually a question answered by humans, not machines. From what I have seen around, even teams that practice continuous deployment seem to take a step back to consider whether they are ready to expose new functionality to their users. My impression is that “release decision” time might vary from […]

Cheat-sheet for Laws, Principles & the such

Have you ever been in a conversation where somebody ends an argument with something like “But as we all know this will never work because of Conway’s Law”? And even worse, have you found yourself thoughtfully nodding even though you are not 100% sure what Conway’s Law exactly says? I for one admit to have […]

X Things I’ve Learned about Contract Testing with Pact

A couple of weeks ago, while at TestBash Manchester, I attended the “Contract Testing in Practice with Pact” workshop led by Pierre Vincent. I had some knowledge of the topic but the workshop helped me get some concepts straight, that either I was not familiar with or I had all wrong. Here are some of the […]

Quotes & Notes on “Leading Quality” by Ronald Cummings-John and Owais Peer

The book: Leading Quality: How Great Leaders Deliver High-Quality Software and Accelerate Growth The authors: Ronald Cummings-John & Owais Peer Engineering and quality leaders do a good job of telling a technical story, such as explaining the testing activities and how they plan to optimize the development process. Unfortunately, most miss the other side of […]

Quotes & Notes on “Building Successful Communities of Practice” by Emily Webber

The book: Building Successful Communities of Practice The author: Emily Webber …training and learning are not the same thing. Companies and individuals allocate time and money for the “training” but might ignore or forget the “learning”. Communities of practice create the right environment for social learning, experiential learning, and a rounded curriculum leading to accelerated […]

Quality Indicators

One of the questions I get very often as a quality coach is “how can we measure quality?” If I were to reply right off the bat, my answer would be “No clue!” as I find it very hard to quantify something as abstract and ever changing as quality. Nevertheless I think the premise of […]

Of Quality, Testing and Other Demons

Being hired as a software tester implied that I needed to have a strong connection to product quality. And indeed the word Quality appeared everywhere. It was in my job description, Quality Engineer, I was taking care of the Quality Assurance, I would provide proof of the quality of our product to pass the company’s […]

A Collection of Suggestions I Strenuously Resisted

As soon as I started working as a tester, I knew that this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my professional life. Being completely inexperienced in software development, my idea of testing was that its purpose was to find bugs. Oh and I loved finding bugs. Starting from gaps in the […]

Have you Tried Turning it Off and On Again? – Appreciating Your Customer Support

A long time ago I was working in customer support, spending my days speaking to unhappy customers who had purchased some sort of electronic device. People generally didn’t pick up the phone to tell us how pleased they were with their purchases. Sometimes they would call to ask for a technician, others to ask how […]

Testing in Babel or Experiences from Testing in a Foreign Language

The situation where development and management don’t speak the “same language” is something that many of us have faced one time or another. But what happens if you are a tester and literally don’t speak the same language as the rest of the people around you? I first started working as a software tester 3 […]