Hell of a Tester

Back with  the 10x tools journey!  Last time I talked about the Kipling method , and this time it is turn for the tool why I wanted to do the 10x talk in the first place. The tool is so simple, yet so useful that I really would not want to work anymore with a computer not having this tool.   The tool is, tat ta da daa, clipboard history.  You know how mint windows & mac operating system's clipboard works. Copy something to clipboard, and it is there. Copy something else to clipboard and the previous record is lost. And that is really sucky. As a result of this, you might end up going back and forth two documents copy pasting, or have a separate place to paste intermediate stuff. Or sometimes you might accidentally copy something new and lose the previous item from the clipboard.  So clipboard history saves you on those cases. But after using it for a while, I've started to use it for other things as well. For example when I see something ...

This time I'll start another series of posts (which I will not probably finish) called  10x tools for 10x tester which is a little bit modified version of a talk I've given a couple of times.  The initial talk was demoing 10 tools from a wide range of categories that I use to increase my efficiency, in 30 minutes. Which is super duper fast. It was actually quite funny, because with this talk I first sent the proposal thinking that 3 minutes per tool is more than enough. But then after the talk was accepted and I started rehearsing and did in my opinion a really quick demo of the first tool, I was quite surprised to see the clock stop at 8 minutes. So I really had to cut everything extra away from the demos, and even skip demoing a couple of tools I originally wanted to. So now for the blog version I might demonstrate a bit different tools.  But definitely 10. And definitely 10x. And the first one is the same as it was in the talk, called  the Kipling met...

This week I dived into the drafts folder of my blog posts. There were many interesting titles that I would want to write on, like for example one with title "The crying game". It had no content and I have no idea what I have thought of when writing that down in the year 2013. But what a great title! But this other one that I'm now writing on had some content and is a pretty dear idea for me, so I'll now finish this post I started back year 2012. And that is, that nothing helps you more than helping others. I have had this principle for a long time now that whenever someone asks for help, that I always do. Even if I'm swamped with work and in the middle of something and someone interrupts to ask if I could help I'll reply "of course!". Some might argue that asking to come back in an hour would be better, but the bad side on that is that potentially this other person is then stuck for an hour - and this is one hour lost. As opposed to helping them...

Keeping up to the deal with my colleague Mili for the total 52 posts during year 2018, this is my sixth one (Mili blogs here http://meeleetester.blogspot.fi/ ).  I am not really in the mood of finishing any of my draft versions and do not have solid things on my mind that I would want to write about. So I thought to do a little retro of my past week, with the classic glad - sad - mad pattern. (nice machine to help coming up with other ideas to retro's here https://plans-for-retrospectives.com/ btw). Here goes: ************** personal retro week 11 Sad Had to spend very much time on solving issues and questions coming from support and stakeholders A lot of people away from office this week Meal on the lunch on new restaurant sucked Few things on "my own backlog" stuck the whole week Lost a query to a report I did couple of months ago that was asked from me again, need to redo Could not do the mob programming sessions I had booked Another problem with Git (...

I've been thinking quite a lot about tester's moving to do test automation.  Lately beause of these three things: 1.  European testing conference , a great testing conference I attended couple of weeks ago. It is very cool due to many things; the way the speakers get compensated, the focus on the conferring side of conferences making it very easy for people to discuss stuff, the way the talks are chosen, and because there are also a lot of developers joining. So anyway when I was talking with several of the attendees, it was a bit strange how it was easier for me to talk about the product development as a whole with the developers, where as with the testers it more naturally moved into talk of automation and tools. Also on the open space, I think the majority of the topics pitched was automation or tool related. And quite little on the process or on the customer facing side of product development.  2. In my company there are a lot of different products and...

This post continues from Mob programming - the heaven of a tester. Part1: the beginning . I will next describe the formula of a rather common and a rather good mob development session. It consists of four parts; The initiation, The planning, The implementation, and The finishing. _____________ 1. Initiation We started arranging the mobbing sessions by booking a few 2 hour slots for the week ahead where our aim would be to do some work in a mob. This was especially important in the beginning as the mobs did not seem to happen adhoc. Even if pretty much everyone always liked and wanted the mobs, people often did not arrange them by themselves. So this kind of forced us to do the stuff we like to do :) Now after starting to make mobbing a habit, and starting to understand where it is especially effective, we have gotten better in initiating mob sessions ad-hoc. So these days it is the most common way to start implementing a solution for problems that seem hard to tackle, on som...

Have you heard of mob programming? Probably you have. If you haven't I stroooongly recommend you to take a look (https://youtu.be/8cy64qkgTyI) or listen (https://soundcloud.com/cucumber-podcast/mob-programming) to Woody Zuill describing the process. My team has been doing mob development (we call it rather that than mob programming) now for two years, and it is superb. We don't do it all the time, but when we do it is inspiring to be part of a mob. And I think it is very efficient too! Also in my role I have several reasons to argue  Why every tester needs a mob (and ever mob a tester) , and I want to tell about what usually happens in our mobs , but those are future blog posts. This time I will tell the story of how and why we started mobbing. I first heard of mob programming from Woody Zuill in Tampere Goes Agile conference 2014. It sounded kind of crazy, five people working on one machine, but at the same time many of the things I heard really resonated. So I was intri...