19th Testing Retreat was awesome

This weekend I spent my time in Denmark. Together with 10 other testers from various nations like the Netherlands, UK, US and Denmark, we settled for the beautiful Lungholm Castle, home for the 19th Testing Retreat. The Testing Retreat is a peer conference that aims to discuss relevant test topics and inspire its participants. During normal conferences there is mostly little time to have the in-dept sessions of the kind that the retreat hosts. Some of this year’s agenda topics were:

• Increasing the value of testing,
• The new ISO29119 standard
• Testing the internet of things,
• Shifting Left, Up, Down and Right,
• Craftsmanship and professionalism,
• Conflict handling using the conflict diagram,
• Targeting your product using persona’s
• Test strategies Qualifiers and Disqualifiers and
• Practical review strategies.

It was a very nice, inspiring weekend, that I trust enables participant to improve their value as test professional and to see developments in right perspective. I am already looking forward for next year’s edition.

 

Business finally understood testing

Test progress reporting can be cumbersome. There is a complex story to be told, but it needs to be done in such a way that the business and project stakeholders get the message. Sequential planning techniques such as critical path analysis won’t work in agile, but stakeholders keep asking for an indication of the progress so far, the work that remains, the bottlenecks and dependencies.

Within my current project we solved this problem by introducing a visual progress report, the subway map. Subway map reports are derived from the London tube map and contain the following elements: 1) Stations: Activities are represented as a station; they have a description of the benefit for the stakeholder upon completion. 3) Date lines provide status information (the train is expected on time, or not) 3) Bridges: Where two or more lines merge, you can define have a quality gate. They provide extra control on the progress (and of course to celebrate success)

Progres reporting in agile context from Derk-Jan de Grood

I gave this presentation at the EXPO:QA in Madrid. It contains examples, a step plan how to make a subway map in Powerpoint.  Within my organization it has been adopted quickly by various projects, due to its simplicity and clearness. Business finally understood testing.

Kano model

In one of my more recent blogs and column I refered to the model by professor Kano.
I believe it can provide a good basis for an efficient  test strategy and maybe drive risk analysis. I found two nice video explaining how the model works.

• http://www.kanomodel.com/media/public/flash/kanotutorial/main.swf
• http://www.shmula.com/customer-experience-kano-basics-and-shiny-objects/2208/

 

Personal invite to the Belgium testing days

On the Belgium testing days I will speak about techniques, methods and tools that we can adopt and adapt from other disciplines in order to make our testing more effective.
This video is my personal invite for you to join my session on Tuesday 18 Mar 2014.

 

See also the abstract and the rest of the program on the conference website

The other 99 tips: Booklaunch

Tonight is the launch of the book with 101 tips for testers. I know two of the tips originate from Egbert Bouman and me.  So I am specially curious for the other 99 tips. Thanks Anderis for collecting the knowledge and experiences and taking this initiative.

CAT certification passed

Yesterday I heard both Egbert Bouman and I have passed our Certified Agile Tester exam. We are both are now accredited trainers for the CAT course. I think this is a nice addition to the SCRUM master training and the SCRUM battle that we already provide.

Image source: http://www.ccnaccna.org

Discontinuity of test improvements !?

Testnieuws.nl published my column “The discontinuity of test improvements”. In this column I raise the question whether we are wrong in assuming that test process improvement  is a continue process.  The way in which you work towards the higher maturity from a natural growth, seems difficult and long. There is a faster way, but this way forces us to let go of some of the familiar principles. Maybe we should we accept that some of our truths, actually are outdated dogmas.  Bridge the gap between the old and new approach for TPI by reading my column…

Excel testing and the cloud

Recently I wrote a column on excel testing (only in Dutch, sorry). This column described that many business decision are based upon the outcome of excel calculations. But also raised the question, who is testing the excel sheets. Felienne Hermans of Delft Technical University did research on this topic and was kind to help me with the column. But there is another dimension to it. In addition to the arguments listed in the column, recently the AG published an article about cloud-spreadsheets written by Jelle Wijkstra. The AG was not mine, so I quickly made a picture of the article…I hope you can read it.

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Translation online

For testnieuws.nl  I wrote a column called “Een nieuwe stofzuiger voor 100 gulden”, freely translated into “a new vacuum cleaner for $100″. In this column question myself why testing is worthwhile and how I ended up in the profession anyway. The column describes a morning meeting with the R&D team of a vacuum cleaner factory. Want to know what a vacuum cleaner motor has to do with testing? The English version is finally available online: www.testnewsonline.com

Source: evacuumstore.com

 

Latte-art

This post is a little out of the box. But hey it’s Friday, so why not?
One of my hobbies is making the perfect espresso and trying to make cappuccinos.
Latte art is the skill of poring your milk in such a way that it creates nice patterns in the coffee. Although I am still trying to master the skill, this rosetta worked out pretty well.

New years resolution

Normally I do not make that much new years resoltions.
But on day one of this year, I suddenly found myself making a list. There are a lot of developments in the testing trade, so its not hard to come up with new challenges. Regarding testing I plan to:

– help other organisations to get more out of their agile test processes.
– apply kanban in one or more testteams.
– learn more about testautomation and integrate it further in my test vision.
– provide training sessions with a strong focus on experience, gaming and interactivity.
– being involved in various conferences, review, program board, track chair, etc
– share my experiences with my fellow testers by means of blogs, columns, articles and presentations.
– co-operate with my peer-testers in order to learn and have fun.
– remain adaptive, and keep open for new resolutions throughout the year.

This later one being a vital one of course, since that keeps the options open. what are your plans for this year?

No Test in Iceland

I was checking the stats of my wordpress site. It is nice to see that it is visited by people from all over the world. As I expected it is visited by Testers from the Netherlands most, followed by UK and US.  Funny to see how there seems to be a lack of testers in other regions of the world. Most can be explained I think, but some are surprising. No Chinese testers visit my site. Should their not be more testers in Mexico? Why is Kenya orange but its surrounding countries not?  I do not know.

Five Blogs – 13 September 2012

Five Blogs – 13 September 2012.

HVA-Aviations in de wolken

In september 2012 gaven ik met Jan Iedema een training ‘Presenteren? Alles mag!’ aan de docenten van de Hogeschool van Amsterdam (HVA). Het betrof docenten van de opleiding Aviations en de training behandelde het presenteren en het beoordelen van studenten die een presentatie geven.

“Tijdens deze training…zijn wij ons bewust geworden van onze subjectiviteit in het beoordelen van presentaties, en hebben Derk-jan en Jan ons handvaten aangereikt om hiermee op een verantwoorde wijze om te gaan. Dit was precies het doel waarvoor wij hen hadden gevraagd ons te helpen.”

Gert Meijer- Docent aan de HVA

foto: J.M. Luijt

 

Situatie:
Binnen de projecten van de opleiding Aviation moeten de studenten regelmatig hun werk presenteren. De projectdocenten beoordelen de presentaties op verschillende aspecten. Inhoud is een belangrijk element, maar ook de ‘delivery’ telt mee. Het docententeam is in een tijdbestek van enkele jaren naar ongeveer 40 docenten gegroeid. Met deze sterke groei is ook de behoefte aan eenduidige, werkbare en algemeen gedragen beoordelingscriteria voor de presentaties duidelijk geworden. Onlangs zijn deze daarom opnieuw vastgesteld. Deze blijven echter multi-interpretabel, zolang er geen collectief beeld is van wat deze punten daadwerkelijk inhouden. Voor de student betekent dit dat het moeilijk is om te voorspellen hoe zijn presentatie beoordeeld wordt en hij nuttige opbouwende feedback mis loopt.

Daarnaast wordt het geven van feedback als moeilijk ervaren. Waarop let je, hoe geef je opbouwende kritiek. Hoe doseer je deze, zodat de student niet verzuipt in goedbedoelde adviezen, maar juist een verbeterslag kan maken.

Opzet:
De training bestond uit een plenair dagdeel waarin gezamenlijk gekeken werd naar “wat een goede presentatie” is en verschillende workshops waarin de docenten zelf presentaties gaven EN elkaar feedback gaven.

Impression of the Test Automation day 2012

June 21st the WTC in Rotterdam was hosting the 2nd edition of the Test Automation Day. A testing conference with a strong focus on test automation. I contributed with in a discussion forum and a presentation. Besides that I interviewed a few of the participants about their expectations and discoveries.