I Wish that I had Think Feet

Posted on 2017-10-30 by Karo Stoltzenburg

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Communication plays quite an important role in the job of a tester (and in our lives, actually), but it can be quite challenging. How to bring a potentially controversial topic across without stepping on peoples toes? How to best deliver complex information in a concise and coherent way? How to structure a report in a way that makes it easy for people to pick up the key points? How to overcome any mental blockages and give yourself time to structure thoughts when being asked something out of the blue? And so forth.

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Twitter Timeline Q3/17

Posted on 2017-10-11 by Karo Stoltzenburg

#September

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Three Ways to get Started with (Exploratory) Testing as a non-Tester

Posted on 2017-09-15 by Karo Stoltzenburg

This is a companion piece for my talk “Testing Demystified” at the DDD East Anglia, where I encourage people from other disciplines, namely programmers, to get more involved in (exploratory) testing activities (because it’s fun! And worth it!). And here are some really simple steps that you can take:

… and repeat.
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Girl, interrupted.

Posted on 2017-07-22 by Karo Stoltzenburg

“Something magical happens when testers and programmers start to collaborate.”1

I’ve submitted a conference talk last weekend.2 It has the heroic (*cough*) title of “Testing Demystified” and is now handed in for the Developer! Developer! Developer! East Anglia event taking place later this year (on Saturday, 16 September 2017), which is part of the Developer Days events series for the UK .NET Community. It’s make is very community driven, about sharing and learning in a friendly environment, which I find absolutely fantastic. The whole day is free to attend, on a weekend (so outside usual working hours), sessions submitted are voted on by the community, e.g. the prospective attendees, e.g. you, and it targets (and supports) the local speaker community. Oh, and it has “Developer” in the title. Thrice. So why have I, a Tester, submitted a talk for this, exactly?

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Twitter Timeline Q2/17

Posted on 2017-06-21 by Karo Stoltzenburg

#June

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Twitter Timeline Q1/17

Posted on 2017-04-14 by Karo Stoltzenburg

#March

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Testing Puzzles: Questions, Assumptions, Strategy

Posted on 2017-04-09 by Karo Stoltzenburg

For the recent evening Ministry of Testing Meetup here in Cambridge I brought some Testing Puzzles for people to solve. Or rather some Puzzles for people to test, naturally, and on the hunt for appropriate puzzles I tried to find types that would give us an opportunity to exercise and reflect on basic testing skills.

The evening was a blast and great fun, as was the preparation; of course I had to try out all the puzzles and riddles and challenges myself first to find the good ones! I ended up with about five puzzles which I vaguely fitted into three different categories (questions & assumptions, strategy, models), and some backups, although we ended up doing only three puzzles of two of the types, but that still gave us plenty of ground to cover and a variety of different angles to explore.

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Organise? A way!

Posted on 2017-03-11 by Karo Stoltzenburg

I went to the World Information Architecture Day in London recently – our UX Designer, Rog, had been before and I gladly tagged along. And as often, if you emerge yourself in a new area, you’ll get great input and learn new things by even just poking into it. As happened, even before the day started, I got some great advice.

Being asked about my motivation to attend, I elaborated that I often get quite frustrated by ordering information or data and was really hoping to get some ideas, strategies, good practices on how to find my way through the jungle and make sense of unstructured data for myself and others. And I got this great response: “Well, there are five ways to structure information.”

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Twitter Timeline Q4/16

Posted on 2017-01-31 by Karo Stoltzenburg

#December
https://twitter.com/Marcel_Gehlen/status/814784767837274112

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Cambridge Lean Coffee 01/17

Posted on 2017-01-29 by Karo Stoltzenburg

img_20170125_075032First Lean Coffee of the year, and the first Lean Coffee and second overall Meetup via our shiny new dedicated Ministry of Testing Cambridge Meetup Group. If you’re in the Cambridge area and interested in testing, sign up!

We’ve met at Redgate – with many thanks to Chris George for organising and Jose Lima and Gareth Bragg for hosting. Great attendance, we’ve ended up with three groups, of which I had the pleasure to facilitate one, which is always good fun. We tackled the following topics:

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