October has been a pretty busy month for Altoms: attending conferences and organizing two in one week is not an easy job. But one value that characterize us is teamwork, so we managed to get everything done and spend the last day of the month celebrating Halloween together.
Those bad Bad habits, who doesn’t want to get rid of them?…
Let’s consider the following hypothesis: small habits that slow me down in my work or stand in the way of solving problems could accumulate and have quite an impact on my work. This could mean that they are the silent, unnoticeable factors that influence my testing in a bad way. One such habit may not make a big difference, but when dealing with more, they could have a considerable influence.
I’ve been thinking about how to approach the subject of “Bad habits during testing activities”.
This concept of bad habits was very abstract to me and no bad or good habit came to my mind no matter how much I struggled. Then an idea hit me. How about I put myself in the context of testing something and observe my habits while I test? I may not pass through all the testing activities with this exercise, but it is a good starting point.
I’ll think about the test activities I had yesterday. Let’s see. Yesterday I did pair testing with my colleague Raluca. We were supposed to test a pretty straightforward feature, but the setup to get there was a bit tricky.
A bad habit that I’ve been trying to get rid of for years: when I start a testing project I tend to focus too much on the results and too little on people.
How does this abstract idea manifests in real life? Here is how…
It’s been 2 weeks since we’ve started a new project. We have to help a team in the US to do a final round of testing before the product reaches the beta testing phase. It is a very tight schedule and we’ve missed the first two days of testing because of environment configurations and user account issues.
This is a really hard question and gives me a lot to think of. Not because I don’t have bad habits, but because it’s really hard to recognize them. Even though I know that there is a lot to learn about testing and a lot of improvement to do on my skills, it’s difficult to figure out what I need to do better while I’m doing my job.
But this is the first step in improving my testing skills. If I manage to recognize what my bad habits are while testing, I will know what to improve next.
Tabăra de Testare (TdT), literally The Testing Camp, is a community built around testers and other professionals from the IT industry who share knowledge and learn from their peers’ experiences during monthly meetings. The community has four chapters in Romania and some Altoms – Oana, Alex, Adina and myself – are actively involved in its development, alongside a handful of other facilitators from Cluj, Bucharest, Timișoara and Iași.
Summer at Altom has been full of challenges. Some of these have showed up in previous posts on our blog. This post is an introduction to a challenge focused on writing and sharing of perspectives on testing matters that matter to us.
The idea was launched during one of our Friday lunches and the Altoms embraced it: let’s each propose one or several topics related to the testing experience that we consider significant/ would love to explore, write/ read about, then organize a poll, and write articles on the most-voted topics.
September, the first month of autumn has come and go and the summer atmosphere was still felt in the air, as days were still long and warm.
But the Altoms didn’t waste any minute and were as active as usual: working and finishing projects, taking part in competitions and organizing the Autumn Camp together with other colleagues at Tabăra de Testare.
So let’s take them one by one.
The next BBST Foundations class organized by Altom starts on November 15.
Altom is offering a Today Software Magazine reader the opportunity to take the BBST Foundations course for free by participating in a contest: post on Facebook or Twitter your expectations for this course using #BBSTAltom.
July has been a wonderful sunny month and August hasn’t been less. Even though some of our colleagues have been enjoying their Summer holidays, we still celebrated anniversaries, finished projects and involved in new ones.
Long story short, read below! 😀