Online Open Space Technology | Elizabeth Zagroba: Organizational Anarchist
The tools the Friends of Good Software use.| Elizabeth Zagroba: Organizational Anarchist
Occasionally I get asked "What drove you to start speaking at conferences?" There are the regular explanations: I was interested in learning from the best in the field. couldn't afford the ticket price or the travel. I was looking for a peer group who know what good testing looks like. Those things continue to be true. But what pushed this introvert who'd rather be reading a book sipping tea off the couch and onto the stage in front of a crowd? Spite. I'd sat through enough boring presentatio...| Elizabeth Zagroba: Organizational Anarchist
We're in a tough spot these days. When a tester leaves the company, it can be hard to justify hiring another tester by looking at a balance sheet. The departure of even one tester, who supported a couple of teams, can impact the rest of the unit as quality declines and integration points deteriorate. A software development manager, faced with forces beyond their control, is in a tough spot. They're relying on fewer testers to do the work of maintaining a system that continues to change. In an...| Elizabeth Zagroba: Organizational Anarchist
Ugly code can mean lots of things: code someone else wrote, code with inconsistent white space placement, code that takes up too many lines, code that requires too many command + clicks to parse, code that looks redundant. I was struggling with the last of these recently. To me, some code a colleague wrote looked redundant. And vice versa, they thought code I wrote was unnecessarily duplicated. They’d built an API client for our new (weeks-old) test automation suite. It had everything the A...| Elizabeth Zagroba: Organizational Anarchist
Origin story I found the website No Vehicles in the Park through Mastodon. It asks you a series of questions describing a situation that you have to judge. For example: "Matthew pilots a commercial airliner over the park. Does this violate the rule?" It's a silly, fun time for dorks who like those kinds of things. What it looks like when you land on the website Testers are exactly those types of dorks. We love reading about Matthew flying a plane over the park and want to ask: what's the airs...| Elizabeth Zagroba: Organizational Anarchist
What is exploratory testing? There is always more that can be tested than you have time for. A tester’s mission is to best choose where and how to spend their time. wandering - purpose = lost wandering + purpose = exploring exploring + judgment = exploratory testing Exploratory testing allows the tester to balance risk (the consequences of a failure) and coverage (observing all possible behaviors). It brings test design and execution together: you use the information you’ve gathered so fa...| Elizabeth Zagroba: Organizational Anarchist
We had a Friends of Good Software (FroGS) remote lean coffee last week. It's a structured conversation that gives people a chance to write down their topics and vote on them, both to choose the order of the topics at the start, and to decide if the current timebox is enough time on the topic. Timeboxes get shorter and shorter to keep the ideas and the blood flowing. We gather our FroGS quarterly for an online open space or lean coffee. All our events abide by the four laws and one principle o...| Elizabeth Zagroba: Organizational Anarchist
The situation In 2015, I was on a large team working to skin the pages of a Drupal content management system (CMS). I'd tested a Django CMS before, but Django is built on Python. Drupal runs on PHP. Every error page I triggered was an exciting new adventure of digging into what the problem might be, and which of the ~15 developers I should bring the problem to. All but one of them hadn't worked with Drupal before either. Half of the team worked out of the office in Brooklyn, New York. The oth...| Elizabeth Zagroba: Organizational Anarchist
I'd responded to an email to the whole company. "Let me know if you're interesting in contributing in any way" it said. I was interested. The context There was a mentorship program was part of the Girls Can Code Africa project. It connected mentees to mentors, and it was being sponsored by our corporate overlords. A few weeks after my initial email, I received an Outlook invitation for an hour-long meeting. I showed up. The meeting After an introduction nearly as brief as the one above, a var...| Elizabeth Zagroba: Organizational Anarchist
An Assertive Tester at work sent me a direct message declaring that the two of us should decide which repository the tests should go into. They'd decided we were "the deciders" here since they saw themselves as the highest-ranking tester in their department, as I am in mine. For most technologies, it makes sense to host the tests in the same repository as the code. For a variety of very good reasons I'll go into below, the API and browser-level tests for our apps are all hosted in one big, sh...| Elizabeth Zagroba: Organizational Anarchist
The tools the Friends of Good Software use.| Elizabeth Zagroba: Organizational Anarchist
