What does it take to differentiate yourself as a tester? How can you demonstrate the unique values and attributes you can bring to the role of tester? How can you push back against the race to the bottom where “everyone can do the job”? Is that really true? These questions and more we posed to Andy Tinkham, and shared ideas as to how we can bring much more to the table that we often think we can.
Also, can software be specified in such a way that it can actually be made error free? Justin had a chance to look at that very idea at the DeepSpec Workshop at Princeton University, and he shared his findings with us.
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Recorded live from Orcas Island, Washington, Matt, Justin and Perze attended the Reinventing Testers training run by James and Jon Bach. James sat down and talked with The Testing Show about reinventing testing skills, developing them, and the importance of words.
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We all know that what we measure is something we can improve, right? We can measure anything and everything, and way too often, organizations attempt to do exactly that. The net result is we measure stuff that is not important to try to inform us of things that absolutely are. Mike Lyles joins us for a spirited talk about measurement and metrics. We can’t escape metrics completely, but we can be a lot smarter about the metrics we do use.
Also, how would you feel if your software update destroyed the product you were working on? What if it was a multi-million dollar satellite? Yep, that happened, and The Testing Show panel gets into it!
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From the idea of automated trucking to the notion that testing will all be automated “at some point in time”, we thought it would make sense to bring in someone who has been part of this challenge for many years. Paul Grizzaffi joins us to give us his take on the promise of automation, the realities of tooling that go into those processes, and what the future might hold for the testing role as well as the possibility of “automated everything”.
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As part of a follow on to the Making Testing Strategic discussion that happened at QA or the Highway, Jared Small joins us to talk about ways that software testing can add value to the software development process, and ways that we can extend the strategy conversation and help make sure that we can be both helpful and make an impact to the organization.
Additionally, we talk about the idea that Scrum can get us 250% better
quality (by some definition) and the persuasion of Trump, though we promise, this not a political show.
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This week, Matt takes The Testing Show on the road, or more specifically, the Highway. At QA or the Highway held in Columbus, OH, in March 2016, Matt was a panelist for a discussion on Making QA Strategic. This is a live recording from that event.
From testing and its place within an organization, How does testing fit into an overall IT strategy?
Josh Assad, Kevin Malley, Jared Small, Diana Woodruff, Erik Davis and Matthew Heusser tackle that primary question of Should software testing have a seat at the strategic table?
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In this episode, The Testing Show talks about auto makers stepping back from the robots and giving human beings a reconsideration. Do humans suffer a skill loss when automation is too heavily relied upon?
Maybe adaptability is important after all. We are also joined by Kate Falanga of Huge, Inc. to discuss Test Management, the changing role of test mentorship in the testing team, and if there is a value to having a dedicated person to be a guide, mentor and potential BS diverter, and what happens when that person goes away?
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In this episode, recorded February 10, 2016, The Testing Show talks Super Bowl aftermath, analytics in sports and how accurate they are (or not), expectations and wild guesses, and the benefits of having a beginner’s mind to a situation and how that may give a person a better chance at seeing how things will turn out (it also shows pretty clearly who on the panel actually pays attention to football).
We talk a bit about legacy systems and what happens when critical systems go down (the IRS being a prime example), and the fact that organizations with legacy apps are reorganizing around Scrum and Agile, not so much for new software development, but to help maintain and continue development on legacy systems. Can we do better? We think “yes”!
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In this episode, The Testing Show crew takes a trip to New York City to participate in James Bach’s presentation to the NYC Testers Meetup. We discuss a bit about the GitHub site outage, and the ramifications of inevitable downtime. This leads into the main topic, which is “what do we do when we don’t have enough testers?”
Is testing really a bottleneck, or is it set up in a way that delays are inevitable? What can we as organizations, and as testers, do to mitigate these issues, and what means do we have to change the process?
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In this episode, The Testing Show crew is joined by Yaron Kottler, Qualitest’s Americas CEO. We discuss the changes at Yahoo and the elimination of most dedicated software testers, how this change is happening in a variety of companies, and what these changes actually mean for the dedicated testing role, and what may happen in the future.
We discuss the idea of software testing as a trusted advisor to an organization, and the benefits of wham that role works, as well as the frustrations and costs when that role does not work.
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In this episode, The Testing Show tackles the NEST Thermostat, early release of inmates in Washington state due to a computer error, and what can we do when our password site gets hacked?
We discuss test design, bug advocacy, long term auditions,
and think about how robots can help you see the way software testers pivot
(or not).
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