Testing Inspiration When You Least Expect It
I was honoured to be invited as the speaker for the April dinner meeting of TASSQ. While the audience was small (only around 25 people I think), I had a lot of fun doing it and think it can get added to my stable of re-usable talks (though on-demand performances of it will be missing the props I use for it).
The gist of the talk is that the biggest inspiration we can have as testers comes not from blogs, or courses, or even other experts, but from living our lives. It is said that you really, really, know a language when you don’t do the mental flip to your first language, translate it, then speak; you just speak. The same thing happens with testers as well. You know you have truly become a tester when you see testing all around you, and not just at your desk between 9 and 5.
The first half of the talk relates how being a house league lacrosse coach has helped me be a better test team lead using strikingly similar approaches to skill development, planning, stakeholder management and efficiency improvements. This is essentially the same talk that I gave at CAST 2008. There is no blog post on it specifically, but I did write a paper on it.
The middle section is all about the lessons I’ve learned about testing from fixing both my washing machine and dryer. I never wrote up the washing machine story, but did with the dryer tale.
The final section is about how we have too much stuff and so I needed to build a shed in the backyard to hold it all. Again, this was documented at the time on the blog here and here.
The talk wraps up with the reiteration of the theme, which is that Testers Notice Stuff. We truly do — often to the detriment to the non-testers around us. Just ask your non-tester friends how much ‘fun’ it is to watch a movie around you.