Evil Tester and The Agile Team
What happens when Evil Tester and Panicky Tester see the new Agile team in action? Will they flee? Will they join in? Find out in our exciting “Evil Tester” comic book adventure.
Slogans! Slogans! Seriously, we don’t need no stinkin’ slogans.
I always thought the slogans would prove the most controversial part of EvilTester.com - more controversial than the cartoons, and more controversial than the name Eeeevil Tester. (You do have to say it like that, otherwise you take it far too seriously).
So after sending these slogans through to you with no explanation, I now present some reasons as to why the slogans exist.
And note…I regard this set of reasons as the ’serious’ set.
What’s all this Evil stuff? Video Version
Just in case anyone thought that EvilTester.com was getting too serious I thought I better provide a little background to the “Why Evil?” question.
The first answer seemed flippant, but all too appropriate… “Because Evil leads to comedy gold.”
Allow me to explain.
A Short History of my ISEB Software Testing Certification involvement
Back in 2001? 2002? Back whenever I noticed the ISEB certification starting, I thought “Hmm… how strange, I wonder why they would want to do this”.
I read an early draft of the syllabus online and thought “Well this seems fairly simple, but misses out a lot of stuff that I do in the real world, but what harm could it cause?”
After the unleashing of the foundation certification, and training and examining began in earnest, I remember reading a trade press advert that offered a “High paid career in testing after one week of training and gaining the ISEB certification” (or words to that effect). I still had enough idealism to feel personally affronted and feeling that ‘what I did’ had some how become demeaned.
In that moment I vowed to ‘Save the world!’, or at least the small part of it relating to Software Testing Certification.
Ultimately I failed. I relate my story here.
I Care
I’m Sure it seems as though I’m Evil.
But it’s only because I care.
Question: Which applications do you use during interviews to ’see’ how candidates do exploratory testing?
After the discussion about passion and interviewing testers I started to rethink how I conduct interviews and I think that in the future I will use MS Paint as an application to see how candidates approach testing.
A long time ago, I wrote my own little app for use during interviews. You can play with it if you like - it has many deliberately injected bugs - so no raising defect reports with me, but feel free to share any experiences that you have with it.
I mainly used this in team based exercises, and primarily to explore presupposition analysis as a method for testing.
So, now to explain the reasons why, and how, I’ll use MS Paint.
…for your own good
“I’m not Evil,
I’m doing it for your own good.”
5 books I recommend to software testers that most testers have probably never read
“What testing books should I read?” such a hard question to answer in a land where a testing book that has value at one point in your career ceases to have value later on.
I do have some books that I recommend to testers, entirely ignoring their context - ha… see… Eeeevil…
So… 5 books, not about testing, that could change the way you think about testing (or my taste in books). Certainly they all changed the way that I approach testing.
…I’m Necessary
“I’m not Evil, I’m Necessary.”
Challenge your assumptions and presuppositions to identify useful variation
Any curious tester can find a number of published heuristic documents out there on the web (James Bach, Elisabeth Hendrickson)
‘Heuristics’ appear regularly on blog posts. (Mike Kelly, Ainars Galvans, Scott Barber, David Gilbert)
In this post I aim to show you an easy way of identifying new test ideas without recourse to heuristics, on a case by case basis, to allow you to add further depth to your own test explorations.