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Productivity

Using YouTube and Google NotebookLM For Speed Studying

TLDR; NotebookLM can create summaries and briefing notes of YouTube videos very quickly which you can use for speed studying.

Freemind Scripting for Markdown Presentation Generation

3 minute read - Productivity

When I was preparing for the London Tester Gathering workshop I decided to try and fix a flaw in my documentation workflow.

The flaw was - I find it hard to have an overview of my documentation while working with Markdown. I fixed it with Freemind and a custom script.

Are you stable, or complacent? Is it time to experiment yet?

6 minute read - Testing Productivity

TLDR; If you are not sure that you should experiment with new techniques then find ways to monitor the domain first, you might be able to learn from someone else’s experience.

When things are stable, and they are going well, a hard question to answer is “Is it time to experiment?”.

Harness Your Ruthless Efficiency as MVP in testing and development

5 minute read - Productivity

TLDR; Ruthlessly look at your process and incrementally improve your efficiency. Take the same attitude when testing and developing and harness MVP as often as you can. In this post I’m going to describe focus and how you can apply that in your work, not just for testing but for software development in general with examples. On the morning of 17th Feb 2017, I created an Instagram video on ‘focus’ and it was about… how ruthlessly efficient we can be if we focus.

On Workarounds and Fixes

4 minute read - Productivity

TLDR: fixes are important. when we have work to do, sometimes a workaround is more important

How to use Jira to subjectively track and report daily on your testing?

3 minute read - Productivity

A long time ago I coded a now defunct modelling tool to help me with my testing. Half the battle with managing and reporting testing involves deciding how you will model it for the project you work on. Generic Modelling The generic set of formal modelling techniques I use, I often map on to: Entities Lists Hierarchies Graphs When using Jira, I have access to Entities and Lists. Lightweight Subjective Status Reporting On a recent project we wanted a lightweight way of tracking progress/thoughts/notes over time.

"Martial deals with surprise" - GTD related to testing

3 minute read - Exploratory Testing Productivity

I made some notes when watching the Dave Allen’s Google Tech Talk on Getting Things Done. In order to help remember them I have mapped them on to Software Testing, with a few additional notes.