After giving a talk about testing to developers, someone in the audience asked: how do you sell testing and quality to the business? How do you get them to realise those are important? Those questions stopped me right in my tracks. In a sense, you never have to sell the concept of quality to anyone. […]
Learning on the Job
I carve out time every day to learn new things while I’m at work. For me, learning can happen in many different ways: I might pair up with someone to work together, I might read a bit in a book about API testing, I might follow a tutorial on a specific tool, I might read […]
TestBash Utrecht 2018 Liveblog
This TestBash is really special to me. It is the first testing event that I went to since my 10-month hiatus. I’ve started working as a tester again in January this year, but going to this edition of TestBash feels like it makes my return to testing 100% complete. Day 1 My original plan was […]
Mapping Biases to Testing: An Inconvenient Truth
Did you know that having a personal doctor at your disposal could do more harm to your health than good? I’ll explain why. The doctor gets paid by you and with their good intentions wants to do good and be useful. So, they start to assess your bodily health. Chances are, some parameters of your […]
Mapping Biases to Testing – The Framing Effect
Hello dear reader, welcome back to another blog post in de Mapping Biases to Testing series. Today, I’m going to write about the Framing Effect. This effect can potentially affect your work greatly. What’s even scarier is that you can never be sure, because the real world differs from a controlled scientific experiment. I’ll first […]
How to give advise and support about a topic when you barely know anything about it
One of the hardest parts of being a (test/IT) consultant is that clients expect you to know everything about every topic there is. It sometimes truly feels like mission impossible. In this blog post, I want to explain how I handle this by telling a story of such a challenge. One of the things I […]
A distributed mob testing session
After I had facilitated a distributed Exploratory Testing workshop, that same client asked me to help them out some more and expand on the topic. I thought it would be a good idea to try out a distributed mob testing session to help them. It would have the added benefit of showing them how effective […]
A Distributed Exploratory Test Workshop
I had the honour of doing my first ever distributed work. So far, I had managed to avoid it. That was mainly by accident, or luck, depending on how you look at it. My first experience with distributed working was a deep dive, because instead of a simple meeting I had to give a […]