I’ve been meaning to write about pair testing for ages. It’s something I still don’t do enough of. Today I listened to an Agile Amped podcast about strong style pairing with Maaret Pyhäjärvi & Llewellyn Falco. I’ve learned about strong style pairing from Maaret and Llewellyn before, and even tried mob programming with them at various […]
Read MoreWhen the whole team owns testing: Building testing skills
The Twitterverse and other social media continue to host many discussions on topics such as “Do testers need to code?” As Pete Walen points out in his recent post, the “whole team” approach to delivering software, popularized with agile development, is often misunderstood as “everyone must write production code”. The “Whole Team Approach” in practice […]
Read MoreStepping out of my comfort zone
The 30 days of testing challenges are energizing me! Day 23’s challenge is to help someone test better. I’m going to combine that one with stepping out of my comfort zone on day 14 by sharing what I learned here. It may help you test better! Recently, my awesome teammate Chad Wagner and I were […]
Read MoreAgile Requirements Exploration: How Testers Add Value – ExpoQA 2016
Raji Bhamidipati and I co-facilitated a day-long workshop at ExpoQA Madrid in June. We shared techniques testers can use with their teams to build shared understanding at the product, release, feature, iteration and story levels. Participants worked in teams to try out the various techniques and contribute their own experiences with ways to enable shared […]
Read MoreExperiment with Example Mapping
At Agile 2015, I learned about example mapping from Matt Wynne. Linda Rising’s session reinforced my enthusiasm to continue doing small, frugal experiments.I came back to work the following week feeling like it would be pretty easy to try an experiment with example mapping. You can use example mapping in your specification workshops, Three Amigos […]
Read MoreWhat I Learned Pairing on a Workshop
I pair on all my conference sessions. It’s more fun, participants get a better learning opportunity, and if my pairs are less experienced at presenting, they get to practice their skills. Big bonus: I learn a lot too! I’ve paired with quite a few awesome people. Janet Gregory and I have, of course, been pairing […]
Read MoreHow to get more women presenters for conferences, and, why there are so few.
Yesterday I ran across Dan Billing’s post about MEWT5. An excellent and thought-provoking post, but at the end, a picture of the 14 participants showed only 1 woman. Given that testing is one of the areas of software that has a decent percentage of women, and given all the awesome women in testing I know […]
Read MoreAdventures in Retrospectives: Helping a large team focus!
I’m a tester on a (to me) relatively large team. Recently I was asked to facilitate an all-hands retro for our entire team. I’d like to share this interesting and rewarding experience. It’s not easy for a large team to enjoy a productive retrospective. I hope you’ll share your experiences, too. At the time of […]
Read MoreTransferring testing skills
My team currently has more than 20 programmers, and two testers. One of those testers is also the testing and support manager, and I also help with support. In terms of the quintessential “tester-developer ratio”, that sounds a bit dire. But we take a whole-team approach. The programmers pair all the time, they are excellent […]
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