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Insights from a Test Lab facilitator at StarEAST

I felt honored to have been invited to facilitate the Test Lab at STAREAST. Being my first Lab at this particular conference, I was lucky to have Bart Knaack, James Lyndsay and Wade Wachs there to ramp me up. They told me about their experiences with the Lab at STAREAST and gave me valuable insights from their personal kit of lessons learned. Their input helped me change the regular approach I had when running other Labs at EuroSTAR and BTD. Once again, context wins over pre-established “how to”s.

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Learning, evaluating and testing with usability heuristics

On the last project I worked on, I had to test the multiple websites of a financial institution. The context was that they redesigned their websites to attract more clients. Besides functionality and compatibility testing, the stakeholders – the marketing department – asked me to provide information about their websites usability.

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Posts

Fireflies by the river – a pet project to learn from

Last weekend me and 3 other Altoms participated at Somes Delivery, a local event in Cluj that wants to present different ways of integrating the local river(Somes) into the lives of the city’s inhabitants. We applied with a project that proposes to bring digital fireflies on the banks of the river. They would be lights that react to noise and light.
The “fireflies” placed in two trees above a resting place by the river would light up only when the noise was under a set threshold. We wanted to encourage people to sit quietly and contemplate the river in the evening.

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Events

Another perspective on Citcon 2016

I recently attended my first fully open-space conference, CITCON Europe, which conveniently happened in Cluj-Napoca (where I live) this year.
I had experienced a bit the open-space format at European Testing Conference earlier this year, in Bucharest, so I had some expectations set: I knew everyone would be able to propose topics, I saw how the “marketplace” would work, and I had used the law of 2 feet before.
However, some things surprised me about how the conference turned out, and I’d like to share them with you.

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Volunteering for CITCON 2016

The Continuous Integration and Testing Conference, abbreviated as CITCON, is an OpenSpace non-profit conference which for ten years has been organized in various cities around the globe. Currently, each year there are four editions taking place on four continents: Europe, America, Asia and Australia & New Zealand. The previous editions in Europe took place in London, Brussels, Amsterdam, Paris, London again, Budapest, Turin, Zagreb, Helsinki and this year in Cluj-Napoca.

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Posts

Testing is all that and more: A project retrospective – Part 4

Hoping I’ve got your attention by now, I invite you to discover the last part of my retrospective series.

Which was my influence within the project?

My influence on understanding the client’s need to be informed
I learned from my past experiences that even if the client is not specifically asking for a status all the time, he wants to have transparency and he needs to be informed of what is happening.

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Testing is all that and more: A project retrospective – Part 3

In the first two parts of my retrospective series I revealed I had the opportunity and experience of traveling a lot to the client’s site.

What about working on client’s site?

Now, this is an interesting topic, because, until this project, I worked mostly remote, in the Altom office.

Working on client’s site was a request I knew about from the beginning of the project and I found it intriguing and challenging at the same time. I was told I should be available at client’s site in Germany as much as possible in the first three months. I knew this would take me out of my comfort zone. No sooner said than done.

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Testing is all that and more: A project retrospective – Part 2

In the first part of my retrospective series, I told you about the first three months I spent on the project, the challenges I encountered and the lessons I learned.

What changed after those 3 months?

Well, the Pilot project ended. And the actual collaboration started.

Since the Pilot project went well and the clients were pleased with my involvement, work and qualified opinions, the project was extended. The trips to Germany were carried on as before.

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