In 2014 our colleague Ru created a tool in Google Scripts to support her testing in an organized and measurable way, using the Session Based Test Management method. The tool is available in the Google Templates Gallery via this link https://drive.google.com/a/altom.ro/previewtemplate?id=0Aqk-dNwZsfwrdHlfYTRSN3FKQzlVenBYWUhZUk44REE&mode=public&ddrp=1#.
The first month of every year is for presenting both retrospections and resolutions. We are starting with the retrospective, to remember how beautiful and challenging our 2015 was.
December, celebrations’ month, has started with a holiday, Romania’s National Day. As it was more like a short holiday, Altoms decided to celebrate it the next day, on the second of December with a special lunch, when we all brought traditional meals from made by us or by our families.
November at Altom was challenging: conferences, anniversaries and upgrading the office.
So, the first days of November came with a newly decorated office, a greener one. Our wall covered in plants makes the office look better, be healthier and it reminds us of the beautiful nature whilst inside four walls.
The week starting with October 26th I attended the courses Rapid Software Testing (3 days) and Rapid Software Testing for Managers (1 day). It was brilliant! I feel I learned so many from both the course material and the trainer James Bach. Further on I’ll detail three things I learned and find valuable, and also mention other things I loved in this course.
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.
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.
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.
