How do you go about launching a testing meetup? I had no idea either, until I did it this year, with my friend Simon Prior. As we announce our 7th event in 2020, I’ll share some of the lessons I’ve taken from this year.
When Simon Prior and I decided to set up Ministry of Testing Bucks a few months ago, we set ourselves the ambitious target of gaining 50 RSVPs to our first event, fully expecting 35 or so max people to turn up. Find out what actually happened inside…
Recorded a month or two ago, my episode of Testers’ Island Discs is finally out! Listen here, and let me know what you think!
An update on the NEXT thing I’m doing to step farther outside of my comfort zone, and something a little closer to home…
I’m delighted to announce in collaboration with Simon Prior, I’ll be co-hosting the first MoT Bucks in Milton Keynes on 15th April 2020 – and our opening speaker will blow your mind!
A chance invitation led to one of the greatest expeditions outside of my comfort zone to date. Here’s why you should consider adventuring wide of your usual bubble too…
For the third and final post in this series of three reflecting on my personal takeaways from this year’s TestBash Manchester I knew I wanted to focus on Lisi Hocke’s closing talk “A Code Challenge of Confidence” – well, ‘talk’ may be a bit weak given the actual demonstration of her topic live in the session! – but I found there were complimentary threads in what Lisi talked about which chimed with several other talks as well.
It seems strange to those outside our industry that success of our software often lies in the way those of us who build it speak to one another. Surely an application lives and dies on the ability of great coders to write great code… right? Whilst that’s definitely true to some extent, this opens up when we begin to consider what “great” really means. What’s good, valuable, valid is contextual – and our software has to fit the needs of so many different people, each with their own context!
Who wants to fail? In life, we strive to succeed, to do well, and to avoid the pitfalls and dangers we are beset by. As testers however, we need to take a different attitude to failure. Failure pays our bills! Without failure, without the human predisposition to make mistakes, short-sighted or narrow decisions, we are out of a job. So – how do we foster a more accepting attitude towards failure, and learn to not only enjoy it, but encourage it?
A cautionary tale of testing “just the AC” and the things we can learn from one structural engineer’s Very Bad Day
