What makes a great tester? A few discussions I’ve seen lately have gotten me thinking about this: What do testers do? How does an ISTQB-following tester compare to an “Agile” or “modern” tester? Is it a tester’s job to decide the severity and / or priority of a bug? Why do people use […]
Category: Productivity

Persons of Interest: A Tool for Minority, Underrepresented and Marginalised People
Note: I was really pissed off when I wrote this, and it reads that way at times. I decided not to “tone it down”, because I don’t need to. It’s not the responsibility of oppressed people to make witnessing the results of their being oppressed more palatable to other people. If this is uncomfortable […]

5 Years in Testing: Then and Now
“Who knows what that’ll be next year, but if it’s anything like this one, it’ll be good.” Hmm. I think we all had a hard time predicting how 2020 would turn out. While I count myself lucky that it wasn’t exactly bad for me, personally, it certainly didn’t turn out the way I […]

Sharing Responsibilities: Circles Workshop
Earlier this year, I found myself on a team with a total of five testers – a welcome change from the solitary one. With this new count came a new challenge: how could we split tasks and responsibilities in the most sensible, fair and efficient way? To solve this problem, I held a workshop […]

(Mis)Using Personas with the Seven Dwarfs
This is the companion blog post to my talk at TestBash Germany 2019 – (Mis)Using Personas with the Seven Dwarfs. Here are the slides and persona pack for the “dwarf personas” to get you started with (mis)using personas in your projects. Watch the talk for free now. I’m unfortunately too busy / […]