I am a big advocate for online meetings. I’ve done them extensively, and not only since the Covid crisis started.  Living and working from Israel, while having customers worldwide, there’s no real way around it. But there is something different, orders of magnitude stronger and more powerful, about meeting in person. Getting back out there! Last week I attended my first in-person conference in over 2 years – Testing United in Prague.  It was actually the first time I left home since February 2020. The conference was nice. I got to meet again with some cool testers, I also attended ..read more

I’ve been working on a concept for a series of webinars and workshops around Test Process Orchestration and the New Role of the QA Architect. Among the concepts I’ve been developing and covering around these areas there is one that is really important and most of us fail to pay enough attention to, and so I want to bring it our attention now. I am talking about the User Story Value Hypothesis Or UVH for short. Why are we even developing this feature? This sounds like a simple question, maybe even a naive question, but because of this we sometimes skip it all together. Needless to say, not aski ..read more

It’s not easy asking for help. When as part of my work I ask someone to come and take care of something for me and to provide better results than those I have been able to achieve, it means that I am openly stating the fact that I’m not able to do something as well as this other person is be able to do it. I am saying out loud that this other person is better than me, that I am not as good as him or her. Some people I’ve worked with are not good at accepting this, especially as they become older and think that they’ve become experts. The absurd thing is that we do it all the time without even ..read more

I am sure I mentioned this in the past at some point.  But since it’s one of the biggest lessons I ever got as a Tester  I think it’s worth repeating, and even expanding on it. Some 15 years ago I had a great manager called Noam.  Among the other stuff he thought me, Noam once introduced me the concept of the “Virtual Toolbox”. He explained that each of us has his or her own Virtual Toolbox, consisting of all the skills and some of the experiences we’ve gathered over the years.   This toolbox is the place we reach in to find solutions for the problems that pop-up in ou ..read more

I am writing this post on that magical interval between Christmas and New Years Day when the World is a different and quieter place. Yes, we have the Covid virus around us, and so we are not traveling or sharing with loved ones as much as we would like to.  But hopefully you are enjoying some time off with a limited numbers of your closest friends and family. As it is usually the case, and thankfully so, during this week or two of the year we will not be submerged in work.  I even hope you are reading these words sometime during first weeks of January, as even blog posts can be releg ..read more

It’s been a couple of busy weeks… 2 weeks ago we had the Fall 2020 OnlineTestConf I was reminded that this was our 9th edition(!) I sincerely had lost count. It was a nice opportunity to appreciate the interesting road we’ve traveled, and where we’ve gotten to from where we started back in 2016, when not many thought an Online testing conference was possible or valuable.  When a world defined by a global virus was something possible only in the mind of some dark Hollywood screenwriter… But back to the good stuff!!! Click image to view all session recordings This time we had some of the ..read more

There is one simple and straightforward practice that I have seen helping testers and teams all the time, but in most organisations it is something that is not used at all. Debriefing your testing. Debriefings should be simple and quick In principle and in practice debriefings are easy implement, they do not take a lot of time and require close to no efforts. The main steps of testing debriefings are: Make sure you are done with your testing task, or at least with a complete section of what you want to test. You (as the tester) choose one or two people who can provide feedback on what you jus ..read more

I have always promoted the concept that our job as testers is to provide quality to the products being released with the end user in mind. A successful release being one that meets customer expectations, and even better if it exceeds them. Since I initially wrote the first version of this post a lot has changed, and testers are shifting all over the place, acquiring and required to have many “not only testing” skills. Still, in my opinion, through out all these changes (automation, DevOps, Agile, continuous testing and beyond), I see the same mantra – keep your users in mind. This should be yo ..read more

I was asked to do a talk on Mindful testing for Swiss Testing Day. I liked the idea.  I have been practicing Mindful Testing personally (and mostly quietly) for the last couple of years, and this gave me an excuse to look back at the ways I have been improving it with my experience. For reference, the first time I wrote about this topic was a couple of years ago, you can read the original here the original Mindful Testing post. Mindfulness is obviously not related to testing I have been practicing mindfulness for 3 or 4 years now.  It started after I read about the practice and the a ..read more

**This is a follow-up Q&A blog post, following the guest webinar session Pete Walen gave as part of PractiTest’s Webinar Series.  Achieving quality with as little “testing” as possible We are all witnesses to a large amount of talk and chatter around expanding testing outside of the traditional realms and boundaries of our profession.  Some people call it “shifting left” and “shifting right”, others talk about concepts such as “testing in production”, and it is hard to imagine anyone with access to the Internet who has not heard about “All team Quality” or “Achieving a Quality Cu ..read more