Push vs Pull Work 0:00 /383.464 1× Last week I published an internal article to our test team at STELLA Automotive documenting our decision to change how we work. I’m not sure why it’s taken me so long to realize: You can publish blog posts in Confluence Doing so allows you to capture the context around why decisions are made Capturing why decisions were made is just as valuable as documenting how a system works or what processes are now. They help others get up to speed faster and provide a way to reflect back on why we did the thing. It also makes it easier to change things later beca ..read more

It’s March and I haven’t published since November. I am just now writing a recap of last year so it’s fair to say I’m a bit behind on things, but I’m excited to share why! Year in Review time. You can find previous years in review here: 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 Family In October of 2023 we welcomed baby boy #2 to our family! Baby Boy Kenst, the second He’s healthy and growing fast. If you’ve never had the pleasure of raising a baby all I can say is it’s a lot of work. (Mixed with lots of joy.) They need constant help and wake you a lot during t ..read more

Observability, Monitoring and Testing 0:00 /202.432 1× Are observability and monitoring part of testing? The short answer is no. The longer answer is if they are both done well, monitoring and observability can provide capabilities that help testing. Monitoring Testing is a search for information. Testers make a hypothesis and then design experiments to uncover information. Monitoring is about capturing our application data and then building dashboards, reports and alerting on it. We can watch for know metrics and errors. We can gather insights into a system’s behavior and performance. Ba ..read more

Closing the gap between confidence and knowledge 0:00 /168.96 1× I was in my first testing job when a former coworker recommended me to another job. He thought I was bright and a good tester and so he gave the hiring manager my number. I’d been doing this testing thing for a year and was convinced it was easy. What else was there to know? But if I could make more money, well then I would do that. I went into the interview with a high level of confidence. The first question the interviewer asked me was to give an overview of what I worked on. He wanted to know more about the details behind ..read more

You interviewed for a new job and everything went well. Now you are onto the phase of deciding whether to accept the offer or not. As part of your due diligence you’ve made a list of your top priorities but something still doesn’t make sense. You’re enthusiastic but you pause to consider your options. How do you compare those options? What requests can you ask for that might make things work? Reasonable Requests A CTO friend of mine shared an important concept when negotiating: make an unreasonable number of reasonable requests. Which is to say when you make fair and sensible requests, people ..read more

When I reflect back over my career and who I reported to, it has been defined by a lack of test managers. My first two jobs were for large finance organizations: insurance and banking. In both orgs I reported to a "QA" Manager. I never saw a career ladder but testers could progress into management. I remember testers holding roles up to the VP level. The only other time I saw a test manager in my career was at my fourth job. My small startup was acquired by a big telecom company. Shortly after we got acquired I flew to India for several weeks to train the testing team on our product. The test ..read more

Each month I artisanally handcraft a newsletter for TestingConferences.org. In it, I summarize upcoming conferences and workshops, calls for participation and discounts. I put pressure on myself to deliver them consistently since they are sponsored. Creating the newsletters is difficult. It takes hours to pull out the information, check to make sure it’s up to date and then format it for MailChimp. (That’s why I refer to them as "artisanally handcrafted".) A month ago I decided to see what parts of that process I could automate. The script wouldn't need to do everything I do, only help do a f ..read more

‌"Testers are the gatekeepers of quality" Let’s be clear software testers are NOT the gatekeepers of quality. They don’t control or limit access to quality software or services. Testers investigate, observe, and report on their findings. Some may go further to fix bugs or build systems to detect problems. They work with developers, product managers, and other stakeholders to ensure the product or service meets the customers needs. Do they control or limit access to low-quality software? No. People can be gatekeepers. Release managers or anyone deploying code quite literally have control. Team ..read more

Back in May of 2020 I opened a job posting for the first of three Software Test Engineer positions. I collected data on my hiring experience and published the results in 2021 in an article called Hiring a Software Tester, an Analysis. You can read the article or review the infographic Ranorex created: Infographic based on first article: Hiring a Software Tester, an Analysis It was March of 2021 when I published the first article. I had hired again. In the conclusion of that article I promised to write more about my process. Today I'll one-up that promise by analyzing the next two Software Tes ..read more

In August of 2022 I asked on Twitter and LinkedIn if people tested their test code. Specifically I wanted to know if they wrote unit tests for their test code. LinkedIn post At the time I was running a team of SDETs at Promenade Group. We were building end to end (e2e) UI tests for our platform. One of my SDETs, David Ward, introduced unit testing to our custom test code. We continued the practice which was my first time truly treating our test code like production code. We had plans to write this article for an company blog but the blog never happened and we both eventually left the company ..read more