The Australasian testing community has another reason to rejoice. We welcome the 1st issue of Testing Trapeze Magaine! Katrina has done a wonderful (and often hard) job of pulling together a fantastic magazine. And two of our own HTW writers, Aaron and David, are in it with cool articles that I am sure will rock some boats. So take some time over the weekend to have a look and read and I’m sure you will not be disappointed. And if you have something to say get in contact with Katrina to get published in future releases.
Rex Black on how to recognise a CDT tester [Updated]
We’re often in a spot, where we have to interview testers for a position. We also get interviewed ourselves. So as someone who considers himself aligning to CDT, how do you recognise who you have in an interview?
Over the years I’ve developed my own style and it gets me usable results but Rex Black and Michael Bolton have put it so nicely into this FaceBook post I really can’t resist posting it here. It makes the point so well I couldn’t possibly add anything more to it.
So if you ever wondered who you are or what a CDT tester interview looks like…
How to Take Yourself Out
Continuing on from David’s post here http://martialtester.wordpress.com/2013/11/22/buying-tickets-is-hard/, another thing just happened. With Microsoft’s release of the Xbox they seem to have misjudged their customers and how eager they are to give $$$$.
So if you hit http://xbox.com right now you will get the following:
Testers (and especially Stakeholders!!) out there, always think about your go live load and what can happen and how you want to mitigate it. Early Performance Testing is a good solution but even just having a good think about it can save you a lot of trouble. And if you think you’re not susceptible, then look at the above! Even Microsoft get’s it wrong sometimes.
ISTQB Fan-Mail
Not too long ago I received an email from my then CEO bringing my attention to an email he had received. For some context, I will say that this CEO was very much in touch with all his staff, he wasn’t ‘removed’ in anyway so it wasn’t uncommon to receive an email from him (a brilliant trait I might add).
Upon my first read of the email I thought it was a joke. Have a look for yourself, then I’ll provide some thoughts.
JMeter CSV data for remote clients [Update]
JMeter is a wonderful product but in some aspects it has it’s kinks. So when you do testing on several remote clients and have CSV data that fills variables you start to hit some ugly issues. In my example here I am reading login data from a CSV file. The thing is, if the same user logs in twice (or more times) simultaneously it’s FIFO. All other users end up throwing an error.
The usual way to tackle CSV files in distributed JMeter environments is to copy the CSV to every client. But that would mean all of them kick off with the same line, thereby causing the problem. You can prevent that by cutting up your CSV into pieces and have one for each remote/client machine. This works but is tedious if the number of clients varies or the CSV changes often. You’d ideally want something more versatile and automagic.
Why should the Kiwis have all the fun?
So, what a great KWST report from Oliver! But now it’s our turn… by our, I mean us Aussies. 😉
I wanted to take the opportunity to let our wonderful HTW readers know what’s coming up in the Land of Oz!
Firstly we have OZWST – The Australian Workshop on Software Testing – happening on August 3rd and 4th in Sydney, Australia’s finance capital! OZWST was born after I attended KWST 2 in 2012. I enjoyed it so much that I just had to have one myself. 2012’s OZWST was stellar to be sure, so here’s hoping 2013’s OZWST will be even better!
On the very next day we will be launching Let’s Test Oz by giving everyone a ‘taste’ of what’s to come in 2014. Tasting Let’s Test will be held on August 5th, also in Sydney. This event is sure to kick butt! What a line up of speakers, a true blue Test Lab, and conferring to your heart’s content. I can’t wait.
Oh, by the way… NZ has some great representation at Tasting Let’s Test. So Aussies, get on board! 😉
KWST#3
The Association for Software Testing (AST) has this year funded large parts of KWST. So I wrote a report for them on what we did. I thought I’d share here too.
The Third Kiwi Workshop on Software Testing
by Oliver Erlewein
KWST#3 Attendees
It’s winter in the southern hemisphere: The weather is getting cold and windy, and people are staying inside. But not all! Testers from all over Australia and New Zealand were flocking to one of the testing highlights of the year, the two day long Kiwi Workshop on Software Testing (KWST) held in Wellington, New Zealand.
This is the third time round and we’re going from strength to strength. This time 19 people were sharing their experiences – LAWST style – about “Lighting the way; Educating others and ourselves about software testing”.
When you fail, get back up and do it again!
“This is the second KWST where I’ve woken up the next day thinking of looking for another career. Sometimes the problems in testing can feel just too big to tackle, and that hits home to me after the event (depressingly so).” – Anonymous
So, yet another wonderful software testing community event has come to an end; KWST3. Oh, did I mention I wasn’t there? Grrr… damn bills! However, I did follow it quite closely on Twitter and have seen some snippets of feedback since the event. The above quote was something that I could both relate to, and take great concern over.
Aaron’s KWST3 brain dump
Before it all leaves my head, here’s a dump of my thoughts after spending two days in a peer conference with the following amazing people: Continue reading
Can we learn from History? [Updated]
Today something wonderful happened (31 May 2013). The Ministerial Inquiry into Novopay has been released. Not so wonderful for Novopay/Ministry of Education/Talent2 but one of the few learning experiences we all have to reflect upon what we do in IT.
A little bit of history. Novopay is the second Ministerial Inquiry into an IT project in New Zealand that I am aware of. The first one was the INCIS project from the 90/00’ies run by the Police. The difference between the two is that this report was actually supported by all parties involved, and it is on a project that actually went live.
Anyway, I don’t want to berate MoE or Talent2. I do want to discuss the general issues I see in many projects and my take on what it means and sometimes how it applies to testers or testing.
Hello Test World 