As the World Turns
“As the world turns” seems like the best way to describe the busy-ness I’ve experienced recently. Feels like I’m forgetting a lot of things and to help I’ve written them down. I’m also feeling goofy so this post might contain a few GIFSs.
Work has been busy as I split my time building out our front-end automation suite and the remaining time exploratory testing. We recently brought on two new testers and combined with the pushes we’ve been doing it’s been all WORK WORK WORK WORK WORK.
For the past 8 or so years I’ve taught scuba diving through the retailer Sport Chalet which filed for bankruptcy in April and last week finally closed the store. While I’m still certified (and skilled) to teach scuba diving I haven’t yet decided if I will. If I do teach on my own there are some logistics to figure out like insurance, pool to train out of, or I could always join another dive shop. The upside of this means I’ll mainly do fun diving and have a little more spare-time!
Outside of those two things I’ve been helping my local dive club replace it’s aging website and leading an AST-BBST Test Design course. These classes are always fun but take a lot of effort for both the instructors and students. I try not to do BBST classes back to back and despite having a one month break between classes I just didn’t have the time to decompress like I thought I would.
For all these reasons and more I haven’t written much, except for this new blog post on LAWST-style workshops over at TestingConferences.org. I have lots of things to write about, lots of things to do and not a whole lot of time. Isn’t that always the excuse? Despite this, I’ve managed to keep TestingConferences up to date and finally transferred it to its own repo! (Want to help out? Contact me!)
Recently there’s been a lot of tweets about the context-driven-testing community (CDT) as a whole (or at least with some of its leaders / loudest members) and their perceived (or actual) hostility towards test automation. Some of this was in response to Chris McMahon’s post criticizing this publication about a single approach to test automation that uses the CDT branding. It’s been interesting to watch and to try to understand and I was glad to see some remarks from a few other CDT luminaries or “announcers” of community clarify a few details:
3/7 Bret, James & I *announced* CDT. The insights were in the community. We organized & integrated them into a package.
— Cem Kaner (@DrCemKaner) June 28, 2016
I have yet to read the publication above so I can’t comment too much on the validity of the criticism except to say I value test automation. I think it’s the only way to be effective as a tester. I also realize it’s a complex topic. In the end though, the real value of the context-driven-community and it’s way of thinking, to quote Cem Kaner, “lies in the nature of the tester’s analyses…” and that’s the part that interests me.
To end on a funny note:
