Agile Fusion Day 1

Written by Andy Tinkham. Date of post: . 1 Comment Posted in Conference Reports Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

And we’re off (slowly). Today is arrival/setup day, so nothing big to report. Attendees so far: James Bach Lisa Crispin John Elrick Mike Feathers Mike Hewner BC Holmes David Jones Cem Kaner Brian Marick Bret Pettichord Chris Sepulveda Jeremy Stell-Smith Bill Wake and myself We’re been getting the laptops setup (installing Eclipse, Ruby, Ruby-FIT, the […]

Comments on learning styles

Written by Andy Tinkham. Date of post: . Posted in Cognitive Science, Culture Tagged , , , , , ,

I’ve gotten a couple of email feedbacks on my learning styles posts, and I thought I’d post a quick note here, both to serve as a reminder to myself (since I’m focusing on finishing the initial draft of my initial learning style paper today) and to possibly stir up some more discussion. First, Alan Richardson […]

Learning Styles Culture-based?

Written by Andy Tinkham. Date of post: . 1 Comment Posted in Cognitive Science, Culture Tagged , , , 1 Comment

I’m doing a lot of reading lately on learning styles in preparation for a paper I’ll be presenting at PNSQC this fall (“Learning Styles and Exploratory Testing”). This (so far) has focused primarily on the Felder-Silverman learning style model (where students are marked on 4 or 5 continua (active-reflective, visual-verbal, global-sequential, sensing-intuitive, and inductive-deductive)). I’ll […]

How to make up for missing learning styles skills

Written by Andy Tinkham. Date of post: . Posted in Cognitive Science Tagged ,

Another thing that Felder mentions multiple times in his papers are that while each person has preferred learning styles, succeeding professionally requires skills in all aspects (e.g., both visual and verbal skills). How can someone who has come through the school system and never developed skills in a particular aspect (due to an education that […]

Professional development

Written by Andy Tinkham. Date of post: . Posted in Culture, Testing Tagged , ,

My wife and I were talking at dinner tonight and she brought up the question of how someone new to testing would find the various resources that exist to help testers grow professionally. I thought for a moment, and realized that I couldn’t come up with a better answer than “do a google search”. A […]

Interacting with conference speakers

Written by Andy Tinkham. Date of post: . Posted in Culture Tagged , , ,

I’ve spent this week attending the STAR East conference in Orlando. Johanna Rothman, who was also there, posted an entry in her blog encouraging people to attend conferences and get to know the speakers. I wholeheartedly agree with her sentiments. I don’t attend conferences expecting to learn new things from the sessions. While certainly I […]

Geeks vs. non-geeks

Written by Andy Tinkham. Date of post: . Posted in Culture Tagged , , , ,

I found the following quote from Ed Felten the other day on arstechnica (originally from this interview on SlashDot). The underlying problem, I think, is that geeks think about technology in a different way than non-geeks do. The differences have sunk deeply into the basic worldviews of the two communities, so that their consequences seem […]