Software Testing and Development Blog Posts

Honestly who doesn’t enjoy reading conspiracy theories? Who doesn’t enjoy putting on the Helm of Paranoia.

I use paranoia as a learning strategy and as a testing strategy.

You can too…

My testing style, attitude and approach has had many influences. I only recently realised that one of them has become very mainstream.

Some words in Software Testing are confusing, we could use normal English language to be clearer.

I have a particular fondness for Taoist classics and I have a fair few translations of the Tao Te Ching on my bookshelf. I love the feeling of simplicity generated when reading.

Software Testing Club released a charity ebook in 2010 filled with QnA from testers world wide, this was my contribution.

NOTE: Samurize does not appear to be maintained any more. A possible alternative is Rainmeter

I still remember my first real test. The first time that I purposefully designed a vector on to the system to answer a specific question and hunt for specific information.

Do you?

I facilitated a session on free and open source test tools at the Test Management Summit. This post contains an edited form of my notes prior to the event and some amendments and additions based on the discussion from the session.

Slides

Slideshare Exploring Open Source Test Tools Load Slideshare presentation

What makes me think I have enough experience to talk about this?

I have coded and designed commercial, free and open-source testing tools. I have used open source, free and commercial test tools. I try to keep up to date with the available open-source and free test tools - less so with the commercial tools (for reasons that I will explain later). I do not claim expertise with all the tools but my well honed sin of avarice leads me to continually seek out, download, ‘own’ and ‘use’ the tools. Giving me the ability to talk, seemingly, knowledgeably about the tools.

Some notes on how I evolved my exploratory testing documentation approach.

TLDR; The learning experience that Steve Martin describes relates fairly well to many jobs, many of us don’t go the extra mile that Steve Martin attributes to his success.