Professional Tester Mag

FYI: Professional Tester has been relaunched in January/February 2010.

It's available free for electronic download at:

http://www.professionaltester.com/files/PT-issue1.pdf

This month's episode contains:

- TPI Next
- VELT
- Towards Quantitative Governance
- Improving Process Improvement
- Rude Coarse Analysis
- Incident Log

Within Europe subscription is €50 per year (6 printed mags). Alternatively, it looks like you can always download the electronic version for FREE.

SoftTest Events February 2010

I just finished my third speaking engagement with SoftTest today.

On Tuesday I was in Belfast, Wednesday in Dublin and Thursday in Cork. My voice no longer works and I'm rather tired now.

I spoke on Lean Test Process Improvement in Agile Testing and I welcome any questions/suggestions on such.

I highly recommend that if you have a topic you could speak on, please volunteer. On a personal front, you gain so much from standing up in front of your peers and speaking.

Don't forget, it also facilitates the sharing of knowledge among the Irish testing community. The Irish testing community is part of the knowledge economy and it is mutually beneficial to help each other out!

I'll be posting my ppt on test-soft.com in the coming days.

If you attended my talk - Thank You! It was an absolute pleasure!

For those you didn't - you missed out on a free learning (I hope) event. Keep an eye on softtest.ie for forthcoming events. More will be advertised very soon.

Tuturial at Iqnite 2010 Germany

My proposal to run a tutorial titled "An Introduction to LEAN Test Process Improvement" has been accepted by Iqnite and is planned for 27 April, 2010 in Dusseldorf, Germany.

On completion of the tutorial, the participants will be able to:

• Describe the key industry test process improvement models.
o TMMi
o TPI
o LEAN

• Understand the LEAN principles.

• Use value stream mapping to model current processes.

• Use value stream maps to identify waste.

• Define a strategy for using the LEAN model to support your test organization and process improvement goals.

• Understand how to implement these models and methods in practice for maximum benefit.

It's a lot to get through in a day! However, it is vitial for testing to continuously improve in order to drive greater efficiencies and effectiveness!

http://www.iqnite-conferences.com/de-en/index.html

Transition to a Test Management Role

So, this week, I place my individual contributor hat aside and I join the ranks of management.

It's actually quite overwhelming because my first instinctive reaction is to open the software and start testing! But that's the hero tester coming to save the day reaction which just frankly isn't appropriate.

I need to look at my team and ensure that we don't need hero testers!

I have a great team and my role is to facilitate them doing their jobs - to ensure that they have what they need to get the job done.

What does that mean? I'm not too sure but I have copious amounts of reading to get through over the holidays. Watch this space...

SoftTest Ireland

I put my hand up and joined the committee of Soft Test Ireland this week.

SoftTest Ireland is an independent Software Testing Special Interest Group – setup to provide a forum for professional testers in Ireland. Its main aim is to facilitate the sharing of knowledge in this discipline.

We'll be annoucing an upcoming series of talks next year - I'll be speaking on Lean Test Process Improvement and how it can facilitate Agile testing.

If you have any comments or suggestions, feel free to let me know and I'll advocate for you.

And especially contact me if you have testing experiences to share! I definitely want to hear about your experiences and I'm positive others will too.

Sogeti Webinar: TMap Next Test Methodology

I just finished viewing this webinar. It's available on the Sogeti web site at:

http://www.blog.sogeti.ie/2009/09/webinar-tmap-next-test-standard-16-sep.html

and is part of their Sogeti Test Leadership Webinar Series that I'm working my way through.

My notes on the webinar are available on my test-soft web site:

http://www.test-soft.com/cms/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=78&Itemid=97

So what do I think? It's a blog - I should say something right?

Well, if TMap Next does everything that the webinar says it does - then it sounds great! Holy Grail great!

But, I'm a tester so I'm naturally skeptical. Sorry, I just can't help it.

Plus, I've invested a lot of energy over my career into reading (books + articles) and attending seminars and I was very surprised to learn that TMap has been around for about 15 years. So why haven't I heard of it before?

Putting all that aside, my next step is not to make any assumptions and investigate further. I'll keep you posted.

Resources

Checkout:

http://www.blog.sogeti.ie/2009/11/useful-online-resources-for-software.html

Sogeti have put together a page listing useful online resources for software testing.

Also, they have a webinar series: Software Test Leadership. It's accessible from here. So far, I've only attended the End to End testing seminar but it was really interesting and I'm planning on viewing the rest from their website.

The webinars are just a great way to get ideas from others without having to go through the hassle of budget approval! They're free!