My Blog
15/02/2016 16:49
This morning I received a message saying some "resources" were not available. That was actually about some people not being in the office today and I wanted to ask for a better wording next time.
The discussion about "resources" vs. "overhead" is popping up every now and then on twitter and...
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30/01/2016 19:54
Useful error messages
Have you come across a check that fails with the message "expected true but was false"? Did you know what was wrong without having to investigate the check first and then the code? I have seen many of those checks and find that they usually cost me a lot of time...
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29/01/2016 19:26
Generating random data
The next part of my tweaks to writing checks is drawn from a talk at the XPdays Germany 2010 by Nicole Rauch and Marc Philipps. I'm pretty bad at coming up with random data. And I don't like doing it. It also mostly clutters my code a lot when I really want to...
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28/01/2016 20:48
Significance
A second thing that I am keeping an eye on while writing my checks is significance of anything I use in the checks. To explain why, I'll give you an example that isn't related to code but shows my take on significance:
A couple of days back our team had a...
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27/01/2016 18:55
Originally this was to be a post about unit tests. Therefore I was hesitant to write this blog post. The testers that might read my blog probably won't need the knowledge as they usually don't write unit tests, the programmers who might read my blog probably know this already and have given the...
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20/01/2016 20:27
How often have I heard that test automation is not real testing? There are endless conversations on Twitter & co about that. There are passionate testers that get offended by people using inconsistent terms and I spend a lot of thought about that, too, as I don't want to be sloppy (sometimes...
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13/01/2016 19:45
The product that our team develops doesn't have much of a GUI, so testing it involves a lot of coding, for example against the API of our webservice. I have done such testing before, shortly, and had figured out an approach to writing the test code that I intended to reuse.
First...
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19/04/2015 14:13
Recently I tested a new app in progress that was far from done and one of the developers gave it to me in a very early stage. I enjoyed that testing so much and was so surprised about the amount of the outcome compared to how few functionailty there was that I thought it might inspire other...
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19/11/2014 18:50
Disclaimer: This is a personal blog, about personal stuff, personal problems and personal relashionships. If you're looking only for professional stuff, you're wrong here ;o)
Wow, it has been a while... More than a year since I wrote my last blog entry. I could fill almost a book about all what...
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02/11/2013 07:07
This is a little story about how missing customer feedback can take all value from something that seems extemely valuable at first sight. It is a story about how to provide no value at all with a present that should have excitied your customer.
Just recently I started at Magine in Stockholm. It's a...
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21/08/2013 07:41
I've had this conversation many times, as have others. On almost every occasion where I have met so-called agile testers (e.g. Agile Testing Days, GATE,…) the question came up “What is agile testing?” For quite some time I have been fiddling around with it on my own and have always...
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17/08/2013 21:40
James Marcus Bach just recently challenged me by asking “What do you do?“ He recommended that I think about my answer before giving it. The question was in the context of conversation with a group of people (all context-driven testers) where I wanted to know what the group should do to reach its...
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03/07/2013 00:00
Some time ago I was at a client to facilitate an estimation meeting of a brand new Scrum team. At some point I broke it off and we didn't estimate at all. Instead we tried something completely different. When I told a friend about that he said "[This was] testing the readiness of a project to...
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27/05/2013 00:00
At Let's Test in Sweden I finally met Pradeep Soundararajan. In a break which I took from the sessions I had the chance to chat with him and while talking I remarked at some point that I sometimes don't know what is useful for others to blog about. Pradeep raised his Eyebrows and said "This is...
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27/05/2013 00:00
Just a short while ago, I realized what the role of an Active Observer means. I have never officially heard about a role like this and our team stumbled over it more by accident than on purpose. In this blog post I will write about what I learned on observation, Active Observers, communication...
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04/05/2013 00:00
On April 19th, 2013 I finally arrived at PSL with Jerry Weinberg, Johanna Rothman and Esther Derby. I think I have learned a lot and I am sure I didn’t digest the whole of it yet. Nevertheless I won’t keep you waiting for an appetizer.
Five and a half days of Problem Solving Leadership class in...
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12/01/2013 00:00
Last week I had a conversation on T-shaped people with a client. Since the Agile Testing Days 2012 I wanted to write a blog entry on the topic and he filled some more gaps in my head. So now the time has come.
Whenever I heard about x-functional teams, I was told that it's best to have T-shaped...
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01/01/2013 00:00
Since a couple of years I write a resumé on my life at the end of the year. This year I hesitated but waiting for midnight seems to yield some time for a last blog entry this year.
Why I hesitated? I consider the year for my personal life as the worst I ever had. It was riddled with losses, bad...
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30/12/2012 00:00
In my last post I wrote about missing feedback if you install a bug-fixing team. Recently I encountered another form of missing and late feedback:
One of my customers was introducing Scrum a couple of months ago in several teams. One team and later two of the teams were working on a self-made...
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09/12/2012 00:00
Working as a trainer in Scrum- and Kanban-workshops and -trainings, I am often confronted with the question on how to handle bugs. Bugs are mentioned neither in descriptions of planning meetings nor replenishment meetings. Many participants of our trainings come up with two or three ideas how to...
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05/12/2012 00:00
When I first read of Agile Testing, I was working on the last chapters of the translation of Personal Kanban to German. As I enjoyed working on the translation and my heart beats for testing since watching a certain video of Elisabeth Hendrickson, I wanted to translate Agile Testing as...
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25/11/2012 00:00
On the peer conference PotsLightning directly before the Agile Testing Days 2012, we had a lot of interesting topics. One was about how to involve testers and programmers both on working together more closely. For a short time it was a rather general discussion of how to "apply" change to teams....
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24/11/2012 00:00
A week ago, two colleagues were discussing about batch-sizes in our company chat. Since then that topic is on my mind and now it's time for me to sort some things out.
As a consultant for Kanban and Scrum I am often asked about ticket sizes. As user of Personal Kanban I have to think about sizes of...
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15/11/2012 00:00
As the translator of "Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life" into German my view of things might be a little one-sided if it comes to Personal Kanban. But precisely this week showed me how useful this tool is to me. At the moment, my life feels like spinning around madly. The last...
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15/11/2012 00:00
On the first page of this website I stated that this blog came into life because of a testing week. I didn't explain what that means so far. Now, I suppose, is the right time. First let me introduce you to the vision behind the testing week:
"For agile programmers and testers who are interested in...
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11/11/2012 00:00
Just recently some colleagues started a new (German) Website for our developers. Just when it was made publicly visible, I chose to test it myself for about 30 minutes. After that I missed to do a proper debriefing, but what for do I have a blog?!
As I posted everything which I stumbled on directly...
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