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.
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.
CITCON 2016 in Cluj-Napoca was the first CITCON I have ever attended and definitely not the last one.
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.
The first quarter of 2016 has been very busy for the Altoms, thus this is the first article on our retrospective.
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.
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.
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.
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.
