I wask kindly asked to answer five question for the Braidy Tester’s Dr. Dobb’s Journal Testing and Debugging page. It was a nice chance to reflect, and you can read my ramblings here:

http://www.ddj.com/blog/debugblog/archives/2007/12/five_questions_41.html

Enjoy!

If you’re looking for a course different to the usual fare, you might want to check out Rob Sabourin’s “Just in Time” testing course, which will be running in Sydney on the 12th and 13th of November, and in Melbourne on the 15th and 16th (New Zealand after that). I’ve heard good things about his presentations the last two years at the STANZ conference, and am hoping I may get to the course.

Part of the course materials include session-based testing, so if you can’t wait for Michael Bolton or James Bach to make it out here next year, this is a chance to find out more.

Details of the course are on the Softed website (http://www.softed.com)

As I live in Australia, I thought it might be a good idea to allow people to find me on Google using the ‘pages from Australia’ option. To this end, you can now find my website at http://www.software-testing.com.au/ or http://www.quinert.com.au/.

James Bach is going to be in Melbourne early June, teaching his Rapid Software Testing course. If you’re in Melbourne, don’t miss out. If you’re not in Melbourne, try to get there anyway!

Details can be found at http://www.softed.com.au/Courses/rst.aspx

After a hectic last year and some technical hitches, I’d like to finally take some action on getting a local software testing group off the ground in Melbourne. Things will kick off with a lunch on May 1st. Details can be found at http://www.quinert.com/. If you’ve emailed me previously or had joined the old forum, please contact me again if you are interested in attending, as I may have lost your contact details due to hosting problems last year.

Hope to see you all there!

While I’m dishing out praise, please check out my new-look blog. It would have looked much nicer, but I was afraid to let my designer go crazy with my blog software’s CSS. This is my paranoia about the fragility of CSS and my CMS, not a reflection on their skill.

If you are looking for a designer, check out Sue’s work at http://www.sue-lee.com.

I was lucky enough to spend three days recently taking James Bach’s Rapid Software Testing course in Adelaide, as well as a personal pre-course one-on-one workout.

I am a regular reader of James’ blog, have read his book, and having read through the RST course slides was really, really curious to see how the exercises supported the materials. I must admit, I was also mildly curious to see how the exercise I’d worked on with Michael Bolton (and James, by proxy) had taken form in the course. A quick glance at the course outline prior to attending told me that I had tried a few of the exercises already, having been lucky enough to have Michael give me a brain-beating at the 2005 STANZ conference. I had already applied two of the exercises in in-house training sessions I had run at my previous employer, so was looking forward to learning not just about testing, but also about being a tester trainer.

What surprised me most during the course, was how the same exercises, with minor changes, could easily become exercises that tested totally different aspects of the tester skill set. Despite having seen some of the exercises before, all but one demonstrated quite different learning outcomes.

It was easy at times to feel that the exercises were ‘unfair’, particularly as I stood in front of the class with my Mysterious Black Spheres. It was easy to feel that the situations into which we were put were so devoid of context as to not reflect any real-world situation. But that was precisely their point: To provide environments in which our regular, unconscious approaches to software testing can easily let us down. The next learning step needs to take place outside the course, as we work towards making our unconscious skills part of our conscious thought, and hopefully be ready for anything.

James talks about how he encourages his friends to attack him at any moment, like Cato attacking Inspector Clouseau. After taking his course, you’ll be waiting for the testing Ninjas to leap out and test your mettle.

James should be back in Australia in June. Keep an eye on Softed’s site for future dates, or register your interest. You will almost certainly finish the course with a new perspective on testing, and what a testing career might mean. In the meantime, read the RST materials, watch James’ ‘Becoming a software testing expert’ Google video, and start taking notes about the day-to-day testing magic that you work.

Time to kick off my new blog at my self-indulgent, self-promotional home. You can find my old blog here.

Update – 2009-08-06: In the migration to wordpress, I’ve moved some of that old content here as well.