STP.Con Spring 2013 Keynote 1 Notes

It’s time for another conference and I’m going to try posting notes again. I’m at STP.Con in San Diego (a place with far, far less snow than home right now). This morning started off with keynotes from Rex Black, Cem Kaner, and Bob Galen on what 2013 holds for software testers. Here’s my mindmap of […]

*bzzt* *bzzt* Resuming broadcasting…

It’s been two months since I last posted here. I got out of the habit about the time that I left MN to go back down to FL for the school year, and have been playing catch up ever since. It’s been something that has been high on my todo list, but never actually accomplished […]

Context-free Questions

Last week, I gave a presentation on exploratory testing at the Twin Cities Quality Assurance Association. It was the same paper that I gave at STAR East in May, with some stuff that I learned in giving the presentation the first time. The paper and presentation are both available at the lab website. One of […]

A step back

In looking back, I realized that I dove into several topics here without any real explanation of why I was doing it. For those of you reading who have not been present at FIT since the day I arrived, here’s a catch-up so that you know where I’m coming from. This is taken from an […]

Wrap-up

Cem prepared this list to help us discuss the outcome of this workshop. We spent this morning discussing and refining it (with John moderating, which I mention so that he can get his Toastmaster’s credit 🙂 ). All of these things are in the context of testing on an agile project, where people typically shift […]

Dinner conversations

A few tidbits from dinner conversations: First, a couple of nights ago, Bret was talking about psychological barriers that hold us back. The example he gave was that maybe he wasn’t as successful as a developer because he didn’t want to redesign people’s code. This got me to pondering. I’m generally prone to avoid controversy. […]

Day 6

We discussed a little more testing this morning. I was still waking up, but here’s what I pulled out as key points in the discussion: * End to end tests put the other tests in context * 3 categories of tests: programmer, customer, tester * Testers might look for risks that wouldn’t occur to the […]

Observations

Tonight we spent the after dinner session taking a first crack at describing what we’ve learned from the session so far. I imagine we’ll be revisiting the topic again in the next couple of days, but here’s the slightly annotated list of points we came up with tonight… Managing XP with cards is like chartered […]

Metrics in XP

This post is in more of a notes style than my previous ones. I was originally planning on making this more prose-like, but I’m not going to after all. I kind of like the way it reads now. Maybe it’ll lead to more questions, but I’m going to call it a blogging experiment. 🙂 Cem […]

On exploratory testing

Cem and James talked about exploratory testing — Cem talked about exploratory testing in terms of categorizing knowledge — by risk, test technique, or approach. Though I wasn’t there, from other comments (and talks with James), I would guess he talked about the use of heuristics and skeptical questioning of the application. He gave the […]