I really enjoy the moments when I occupy myself with something far, far away from testing and it suddenly makes complete sense and shines light upon a topic that I know from work. Obviously I’m the connecting factor in the equation, but it amuses me nonetheless to read about screwdrivers as a description of the advantages you gain with testing, to follow a bagel recipe and draw analogies to performance testing or to enjoy Borges and find the importance of context shown as its finest.
2016 saw a really nice range of evening Meetups in the Ministry of Testing Cambridge group – with talks, workshops and open formats like Show & Tell, Games or just drinks scattered throughout – check the line up of our fantastic speakers below!
Due to easier logistics for presentations and workshops I started to host more of the Meetups at offices. I’m really grateful for the support of test managers like Neil Younger and James Thomas who are open to have meetups being run in their companies – a shout out to DisplayLink, Linguamatics and Metail for hosting us this year!
Again an excellent Cambridge Lean Coffee, this month at Nokia, hosted by James Coombes (many thanks!). Great discussion, and on a site note, we found it interesting that we get into a habit of asking questions rather than just putting a topic out there.
For the most recent Software Testing Club Meetup here in Cambridge I brought Games :)
Games? Why?
I’ve wanted to try this out, as I’ve noticed that playing Games (at least a certain flavor of Games) is a widespread phenomenon with Testers, you can find it as
It’s probably fair to say that Jerry Weinberg: ‘Perfect Software and other illusions about testing’ is one of a handful core resources when you want to learn about Software Testing. My manager recommended it to me when I first met him, and I read bits and pieces here and there, but somehow never found the time to read it through properly from cover to cover. But as I’ve set myself a challenge to read three books a month this year, and have been finding myself being drawn toward non-fictional works more and more, I saw a chance to finally fit it in.
‘Perfect Software’ is more than worth your time, and feels like one of the books that will teach you something new on every re-read. The following is not a comprehensive list, but a random one of (often paraphrased) quotes that stuck out and thoughts that the book invoked in me, /this/ time round.
#March
For the last Software Testing Club Meetup here in Cambridge I shamelessly hopped on the wagon and directed us to go see the PechaKucha Night at the friendly Espresso Library near Parker’s Piece.
PechaKucha Nights are informal and fun gatherings where creative people get together and share their ideas, works, thoughts, holiday snaps — just about anything, really — in the PechaKucha 20×20 format. PechaKucha 20×20 is a simple presentation format where you show 20 images, each for 20 seconds. The images advance automatically and you talk along to the images.
Last week was #TestBash and I’m still fully excited about the experience. The conference for me started off with the Workshop Day, I attended Ash Winter‘s “Testing the Bigger Picture – System Architectures”. The topic is something that resonated a lot with me the last few months – as recently mentioned, and also from experiences at my workplace, where we started to do collaborative sessions on system architecture, zooming in on different parts of our system and exploring them via the whiteboard. Ash’s workshop hit the mark for me there.
putzerfisch - thoughts on testing 