After four highly eventful years, it is time for me to bid eBay farewell. So much has happened during this time that it would be impossible to capture it all, but the very short version is that these have been some of the most formative years of my professional career. Moving from Tokyo to London […]
Standout – A career guide to gainful employment as a skilled software tester A little while back I started collating my notes for a workshop I have on interviewing for jobs and writing/reviewing CVs. Some time in the next couple of days, I looked up from my keyboard and realised I’d written over fifty pages. […]
Cynefin is a sensemaking framework comprised of five distinct domains – Obvious, Complicated, Complex, Chaos and Disorder. The term framework is deliberately chosen and is important. It is not a categorisation model, though I have used it as one to good effect on multiple occasions. Rather, each domain provides you a distinct lens through which […]
In July of 2016 I attended a 4-day workshop with Dave Snowden on complexity and the Cynefin sensemaking framework. For me, Cynefin was something that had floated around the periphery of my interest for a number of years, but whilst it seemed like a nice concept, I didn’t see how it was applicable to my […]
The London Tester Gathering Workshop will be held on June 29th and 30th. Martin Hynie and I will be holding a workshop – An Introduction to Cynefin and Complexity for Software Testers. Cynefin is one of those things that was on the periphery of my interest for a number of years before I finally took […]
After my first post on coding kata, I discovered like with most thoughts I’ve had in my life, that others have walked this path before me. Quite a few people reached out and shared their kata experiences with me. It looks like there are many out there who use kata for deliberate practice and a bunch of […]
I’m very lucky to be working at eBay with some of the most talented people I know. More fortunate still perhaps that they indulge me in my regular experiments in making our department a better place to work. I’ve been thinking about what I perceive as deficiencies in coding kata and talking to one of […]
A little while ago, I contributed a chapter to David Greenlees’ anthology on Software Testing as a Martial art. My chapter started out as a bit of a rant against the appropriation of Japanese language by some Agilistas without having an understanding of the underlying culture. That is perhaps the least interesting part of […]
In early 2015, Maria Kedemo asked me if I’d like to work with her on a workshop around testability. At the time, I wondered whether there was really enough in the subject to warrant a workshop. Testability seems like a pretty straightforward topic, right? It’s how easy something is to test. I’d seen James Bach’s […]
Ministry of Testing has just published the next in a series I’m writing on the subject of testing and management/leadership. This one is on managing the relationship between tester and line manager.
