Inspired by a Tweet from Jason Gorman I had to look up the definition of professionalism in my MacBook Pro. Amazingly I found the following:
the competence or skill expected of a professional : the key to quality and efficiency is professionalism.
• the practicing of an activity, esp. a sport, by professional rather than amateur players : the trend toward professionalism.
Let’s discuss this in the light of testing and Software Craftsmanship.
Continue reading ProfessionalismToday I crossed the path of a blog post on Why should we care about software craftsmanship. It’s basically a two part blog entry from Gael Fraiteur who visited the Software Craftsmanship conference in London, and reflected afterwards back on what Software Craftsmanship is to him, and where he sees problems with the notion of the term heavily influenced by a talk from David Harvey called Danger – Software Craftsmen at Work. Uncle Bob Martin wrote an excellent reply to the concerns here, which I won’t repeat. From my perspective there is one important argument missing: on customers, business representatives, and project stakeholders. That said, I agree to everything from Uncle Bob, but here is what I would add.
Continue reading Productive PartnershipsAt the Agile Testing Days I led a small session at the Open Space day on the relevance of craftsmanship with testing. Simon Schrijver and Zeger van Hese provided me their feedback on the Software Craftsmanship Manifesto as well as the Ethics we came up shortly after publishing the manifesto. When the momentum for this discussion seemed to decrease, the expected unexpected within Open Space session happened. Here is my summary and my thoughts on it.
Continue reading Testing CraftsmanshipContinuing the series of questions from the CONQUEST 2010 conference in September, this is the last piece we’ll take a closer into. Today is on test automation.
Continue reading What you always wanted to know about Testing and Quality Assurance – AutomationContinuing the series of questions from the CONQUEST 2010 conference in September, we’ll take a closer look on questions regarding actually testing software.
Continue reading What you always wanted to know about Testing and Quality Assurance – DoingA few years ago, my superior at my job at that time asked me to try to note down what I had in mind about testing, and how to approach test automation. He also convinced me to try out the commonly in use form of patterns. Inspired by those Design Patterns, Fearless Change Patterns, Apprenticeship Patterns, xUnit Test Patterns, I sat down and started to write patterns on function test automation, and the thing we used to call ATDD…
The Software Test & Quality Assurance magazine has an interview from Matt Heusser with me in their issue for this month. The column is called Ask The Tester and I answer ten questions from the experienced software testers in it. You need to sign up to access the material, but it’s free of charge (and of ads).
On another note I wrote an article on how to develop software development for the current issue of the Agile Record.
Last week, I attended the Agile Testing Days in Berlin. I presented on Wednesday afternoon on how to self-educate yourself in Software Testing. I uploaded the slides to slideshare.
Alternative Paths For Self Education In Software Testing Webinar from Markus Gärtner
In early September I did a webinar on the same presentation. You can access and download the webinar at the EuroSTAR pages.
Rob Lambert put up the final chapter from The Deliberate Tester. In the eighth chapter, Peter’s boss asks him to get onto his first project. He immediately starts to certify everyone, … oh no, he makes some suggestions to the customer on how to test their application.
It has been quite some work to write this throughout the year, but it has been great fun. I don’t think I will extend this series soon, as I currently feel like I have to limit my work-in-progress for writing. I hope you liked this nice little story. Thanks for reading.
At the Agile Testing Days in Berlin, Jennitta Andrea held a keynote on how to reinvigorate your retrospectives. This is my write-up from her talk.
Continue reading Agile Testing Days: Reinvigorate Your Retrospectives