Podcast

Welcome to Episode 22 of The Evil Tester Show, where we’re diving into the fascinating world of practice with the renowned James Lyndsay. In this conversation, your host Alan Richardson chats with James about the essence of practice in software testing, exploring how exercises and real-world scenarios can enrich our skills. James shares insights on his weekly online practice sessions and the interactive Test Lab concept, offering a dynamic playground for testers.

This episode explores how to navigate context in testing environments, adapt our approaches, and effectively challenge and evolve systems. Discover the importance of context-driven testing in software development, exploring models, adaptability, and useful practices.

This episode covers the Test Automation Pyramid, created by Mike Cohn in 2008-2009 in the book “Succeeding With Agile”. We will go beyond the diagram and look at the model that supports it. Then deep dive into the model to explore it’s meaning in relation to Automated Execution Coverage, not Testing.

The most common Testing Entities that I’ve encountered over the years are: Test Condition, Test Scenario, Test Case, Test Script. In my Testing I pretty much now have: Test Idea, Test Log (Execution Log). Is there any value in the original Testing Entities? There might be if we view them as logical concepts, but not really as physical artifacts.

Top 3 Phrases that should carry trigger warnings for the Test Community: Manual Testing, Test Automation, Quality Assurance. In this episode I’m going to talk about Manual Testing. And I’m going to talk about what we might want to say instead of “Manual Testing”.

Manual QA is dead. Companies are getting rid of their QA teams. Quality Control performed manually is phasing out of style. What can we do instead? Become coaches, assistants or advisors? We could become developers? Or we could be better testers. QA and Quality Control is not Testing. This might be how people learn.

In this podcast I discuss test automation biases and how to avoid them.

In this podcast I discuss a UK government guidance document on exploratory testing.

In this podcast I discuss How to recruit testers: the job spec, and the audition process.

In this podcast I discuss How to get a job in testing. But… When we discuss how to get a job in testing. The answer is that we don’t know. No-one actually knows. Because getting a job is completely and utterly dependent on the employer. But there are things we can do to improve our chances….