Somehow it got to be 2023 all of a sudden! I hope the new year brings good things to everyone. My heart goes out to people struggling with the many difficulties and evils in the world. It always feels a bit weird to talk about mundane stuff like software quality. I wrapped up the year by donating what I could to the awesome organizations that are trying to help in many ways. All that said – I’d like to share what I’ve been doing, especially training and consulting.
2022 was a big year of change for me. After 40+ years of working as part of a software development team, I took the plunge and started my own training and consulting business. You’re already on my redesigned website, there is more information here!
Going freelance not only gave me more time with the donkeys, it gave me more time to collaborate with Janet Gregory and the rest of our awesome Agile Testing Fellowship crew. We updated our original course to incorporate our (mostly Janet’s) holistic testing model, and renamed the course to reflect this: “Holistic Testing: Strategies for Agile Teams”. Even more exciting – we developed a new course, “Holistic Testing for Continuous Delivery”, and have started training our trainers so they can offer it around the world.
Another exciting challenge for me was to use Janet Gregory and Selena Delesie’s Quality Practices Assessment Model to do an assessment for a client. The client found it super helpful and they’ve already started implementing focused improvements based on what we learned together. I also was privileged to review chapters of Janet’s and Selena’s new book as they worked on it, and give them feedback. I’m so excited about the book, and it’s available now on LeanPub. I would love to help more organizations start doing regular assessments to guide their continual improvement.
I recently was honored with an invitation to help demonstrate Willem Larsen’s ensemble/mob programming RPG game on the Mob Mentality Show, This is a wonderful way for people to learn how to work in an ensemble (or mob). Part 1 and Part 2 are available on YouTube. We hope to record more this year! We had a blast playing the game.
Janet and I continue to record our ~15 minute video chats on our Donkey & Dragons YouTube channel! Our upcoming episode features a chat with Fiona Charles, learning from her about ethics in software development. We also create our monthly Agile Testing Fellowship newsletter and sort of monthly blog posts, keep checking https://agiletestingfellow.com to see what’s new there!
