Five Guardrails to Build Up the Confidence to Release

I won’t lie. Every time we release something new to our users, I get stressed. Will they like it? Will they use it? Did we miss something? Did we break something we didn’t expect? And over the years, in order to relieve my anxiety, I often wondered: How can we measure the quality of a […]

Prerequisites for Teams Without Testers

For the past three years I am working in development teams that don’t employ a professional tester. Even though there are skills I miss working without testers, still these teams manage to deliver software in good quality. Nudged by a Twitter conversation, I started thinking what were the things that needed to be in place […]

Skills I Miss Working Without Testers

For the past two years I am the Product Owner in teams that don’t have a dedicated tester. Within the team, we discuss in depth the implications of anything new we plan to develop and test before releasing a feature. Everyone has the best interest of our end users in mind and we all strive […]

Memories of Agile Testing Days 2017

Back in 2017, I wrote an internal blog post about my first visit at Agile Testing Days, called “Are Testers Obsolete? Spoiler Alert, They Aren’t”. Besides the occasional obsolete link, my inability to find the reference to the images (if they are yours please let me know), and my shifting away from testing I still […]

Overcoming the Fear of Talking to Users – Learning about the Product

As I wrote in my previous post I am not very comfortable talking to our end users. What helps me become more confident, is to have a better understanding of what I am actually talking about. To that effect, I started analysing our product to find out how its individual parts are working. Here is […]

Decoupling Deployments from Releases: in Other People’s Words

One of the discussions I keep on having is how practices like Continuous Delivery can jeopardise quality, not allowing enough time for “proper testing”. If every code change can be deployed to production how can we possibly know if the end user experience will remain good? A technique for maintaining a certain level of quality […]

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 […]

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 […]

How Being Lazy in School Helped Me in Testing

I was always a good student. Never excellent, but good enough not to get any complaints from home. Not to be misunderstood, it was not only my parents pushing me to have good grades. I liked being a good student, I would just never make any extra effort to become the best one. My high […]