Work With Me

Availability

Generally, I’m interested in hearing about projects that match py profile. That said, I prefer completing my current project (and therefore contract) over beginning a new one.
It’s my firm belief that ending a contract prior to the agreed time period, requires a very good explanation.
And in fact, the only contract I could not complete was due to being diagnosed with colon cancer back in 2018.

What You Want (And What I  Offer): Client-Oriented Testing

You and your team build software and are looking for someone to help you with software testing. Preferably one who likes to share his knowledge and whose ultimate goal is to make himself redundant. The whole approach to testing depends on what kind of information you need to make your business decisions. Some questions are:

• Does the software meet the given requirements/specifications?
• What are the risks of releasing (or not releasing) the software?
• How can we deploy continuously to our production system?

Depending on what exactly you need to know, the strategy, design and execution vary a LOT.
I help you find the right questions for your business and set up tailored test approach for your product (or project).

As I wrote in “Testing And The Two Values of Software“:

Also, I definitely want my clients, as well as their clients, to be happy with the software I help to develop, not only today […].

And I mean it. I do believe great software is possible.

I’m available for contracting, coaching and training.
Contact me at the.tester@seasidetesting.com.

Here are some examples of my work to help you figure out how I can help you—be sure to check out the blog posts, too.

Other Places on the Web

• FreelancerMap: https://www.freelancermap.de/profil/stephan-kaemper
• Mastodon: https://sw-development-is.social/@TheTraveller
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/S_2K
• GitHub: https://github.com/s2k
• Xing: https://www.xing.com/profile/Stephan_Kaemper/

Associations

• I’m an Agile Testing Fellow. As the fellowship’s website explains, we are ‘a community of practitioners forging new frontiers in agile testing.’
• I’m a Champion in the Association For Software Testing

Books and Contributions

• I am the author of Fast Feedback Using Ruby.
• I contributed to “More Agile Testing” (Lisa Crispin, Janet Gregory); see Chapter 23, “Testing and DevOps”.
  This is a description of testing your infrastructure in a DevOps team.
• I also contributed the German translation of ‘Quick Tools for Agile Testing‘ (‘Prinzipien für Agiles Testen – 10 Prinzipien für Agiles Testen’).
• I published (and contributed to) ‘Software People … Work From Home — Insights & Experiences From Planet Earth‘. 

A Selection of Bug Reports

Bug reports are one work product of testers. Here are some links to bugs I reported:

• Product: FakeFS, a testing library to avoid using the actual file system when testing (in Ruby)
  Short description: A class method of the File class is not available when using FakeFS.
  Bug Report: https://github.com/defunkt/fakefs/issues/224
• Product: RubyMine, a Ruby IDE
  Short description: The code refactoring tool doesn’t accept an exclamation mark (‘!’) as the last character of a method name
  Bug Report: http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/RUBY-11106
• Product: RubyMine IDE / Cucumber
  Short Description: The reported test execution duration is too long for some test scenario descriptions (called scenario outlines).
  Bug report: http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/RUBY-11054
  Remark: As you can see in the bug history, the ‘real’ bug was actually in Cucumber. That’s particularly fascinating since I tested with cucumber only (i.e. running the scenario outside RubyMine) and didn’t find this.
• Product: The Euruko 2013 web site for ‘call for papers‘
  Short description 1: Users can vote for talks by dragging them into a ‘Selected tasks’ list. This list couldn’t be displayed on some window sizes
  Bug report 1: https://github.com/euruko2013/vestibule/issues/49
• Remark: Here you see how fast bug can be fixed, when volunteer testers and programmers cooperate and how much fun this can be.
  Short description 2: The ‘drag & drop’ mechanism for voting on talks didn’t work on iPads
  Bug report 2: https://github.com/euruko2013/vestibule/issues/50
• Product: OpenOffice (Writer)
  Short description: With a large user-set page width, the left margin cannot be set to values larger than 99,99cm
  Bug report: https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=122203
  Remark: This bug report was provoked by an assignment in the great course ‘Black Box Software Testing – TestDesign‘, offered by the Association for Software Testing

Some Code

Here’s some code I wrote:

1. https://github.com/s2k/limit_detectors/
   It’s a Ruby gem that helps detect whether criteria are met for at least or at most a given number of elements in a collection.
2. https://github.com/s2k/fd
   It is a simple file-dumping tool with a long history. I wrote it in 2004 in another world: I was made for Windows, used ISO-8859-1 as the (only) character set, and also expecting another file system.
3. https://github.com/cucumber/cucumber-ruby/pull/1641
   It’s a pull request for cucumber-ruby, which fixes a NoMethodError that is raised when cucumber  is executed, and the environment variable CUCUMBER_COLORS is set.

What People on exercism.io Say about the Feedback I Give

https://exercism.org/profiles/s2k/testimonials

• Very good at helping students find an optimal solution with many constructive advices.
• Very helpful and patient. Nice chat about computer science in general. Thank you!
• Great advice to help me clean up what I thought was a good simple approach for an even better one.
• Extraordinary feedback guided me by giving insights about paradigms that I could use
• Very good feedback. Found an issue I didn’t see and provided a way to write the code better using one of Ruby’s own built in method.

Finally

If you prefer that, here’s a more classical view in the form of a PDF file.