Tales from TestBash NY

TestBash is one of the best context driven testing conferences ever. And although I've always wanted to speak at TestBash in Brighton, my talk submissions have never really fitted the theme... Until TestBash NY!! I was extremely lucky and honored to be speaking at TestBash NY, doing a talk on "How to succeed with difficult [...]

“Start off with a turd and then polish it” – Really??!!?!

One of the most interesting discussions in the Agile community at the moment is about "MVP". I recently had a conversation with various community members and I heard someone say that MVP should be thought os as "starting off with a turd and then polish it"... It was another one of those times where I felt like I [...]

Experiences of LTG Workshops 2015

The "LTG Workshops" conference is a two-day, two-track conference consisting of eight 4 hour workshops over the two days. I had the privilege of running a workshop on the first day, about "Visual Creativity" with Christina Ohanian. We spoke about Sketch Noting and Mind Mapping, and how they are extremely useful things to incorporate into your requirement gathering [...]

Let’s Test Day 1… What a day!

Wow. It's 5am and I've just got back in from socialising with Michael Bolton, Lars Sjodahl and Philip Quinn (a fellow Glaswegian) where I left them after the past hour of telling some classic jokes and Michael playing his mandolin (and me and Philip getting into the full swing of things being reminded of back home). Today [...]

A Real(ly Questionable) ISTQB Question…

So... Another blog post stemmed from the depths of the LinkedIn forums. This time someone was asking for advice about answering an ISTQB exam question. The question is as follows (with this exact wording): If you are flying with an economy ticket, there is a possibility that you may get upgraded to business class, especially if [...]

Estimations, Guesstimations, Shmesstimations…

I recently found these "No bullshit estimation cards" I can't agree more with the message they send regarding estimations. Almost everywhere I have worked, there has been a big emphasis on the need for estimating the time and effort for implementing and releasing a new feature, but in almost every case we get it wrong. Whether that is missed [...]

Self Learning – How do you eat yours?

In the past 5-6 years I feel I've really stepped up my game with self learning. I began to understand that to advance in my career, I need to take action on my own and learn new things to advance myself. I find this easy to do, purely because of the fact that I love what [...]

Declarative or Imperative? How do you write your feature file scenarios?

BDD is something that I find more and more companies attempting to utilise these days. So with everyone dabbling in writing feature files, I wanted to blog about the differences between Declarative and Imperative writing styles when it comes to writing your scenarios. Whats the difference? This is sometimes difficult to explain, but I usually like [...]

Dispelling the misconceptions #6 – “Let it fail! As long as we fail fast!”

There has been lots of discussions about "failing fast" and how it's really good and we should all be aiming for this, but I think this is stemming a massive misconception... But I'm going to try to keep this post quite short. If we fail, then yes, I think failing fast is a pretty good idea. It [...]