Wednesday, August 12, 2015

Me Teaching Testing (Brighton in October, wink wink)

For quite many years, I've had absolutely wonderful places to work in. I made an active choice of not being a consultant or contractor, and thus I've had the privilege to learn my craft (pretty good testing if I may say so) in context of product companies. Wonderful in the sense that they're flexible and let me train on the side of normal work as a tester / test manager.

Back in the days pre-dating context-driven testing, I founded my learning to Cem Kaner's Testing Computer Software. For a single career-defining moment, reading that book would be my top item. I learned there were companies that considered opportunity cost and optimised their testing to be smart. And that those companies typically in the first front were product companies.

Over the years, I've given numerous positive remarks about things that surprised me positively, changed business models with my feedback, contributed to many great features that work and logged my fair share of bug reports. The mindset I work from I would refer to as exploratory testing. It allows me to test appropriately and dig in deep when I need to, learn a layer by layer challenging my knowledge to find out things about the product I'm testing.

I've also been teaching quite a while. I started doing that in 2001. For quite a while, I taught courses on testing folklore. Things I'd experienced. Little exercises to wake you up to think. Tips and hints on how to navigate the testing corporate jungle. Over time, I became 'a testing dictionary' for the Finnish local community, someone you could ask pointers on just about anything in testing.

At some point having coached enough testers as part of my work, I realised the courses need to change. That I need to move from focus on folklore to focus on doing. My Exploratory Testing Work Course is the course package on the theme I've been delivering the most, and put most love and dedication on. And this course now sees the first public outside Finland delivery, with Ministry of Testing in Brighton Thursday Oct 22. Will I see you there?

I've built my course around the need to learn to self-manage the work we do while testing, to dig in deeper for more information. I've built my way of teaching how I think and keep myself on track, and  build on those ideas leading my students to test real software with me. Learning from me, but also learning from peers on the class. A safe place to try things out and to get feedback.

If you are like me, you would have already been to many other courses and you'd still learn a lot. If you haven't been as lucky on receiving training, this course could give you a framework to deepen your skills while testing in day-to-day work.

If Brighton is far away and the times just don't match with your other plans, I'm hoping to keep in touch otherwise. I always love a good, constructive discussion about the wonders of testing and developing software. If you feel like getting in touch, my email is in my twitter profile - for a reason.