Today begins the Rapid Software Testing course here in Helsinki. The course is mastered by none other than James Bach.
Anyhow, this blog post is a vent of my thoughts before the event and to explain some of my goals and expectations towards the course.
It has been some time when I previously talked to James Bach in Twitter or Skype, and to be honest I'm a bit intimidated. Not because of his status but mine. As a chairman to the Finnish Association of Software Testing I should pose some status as a testing professional. Not say I don't do testing but there's a chance that me not being able to do hands on testing regularly might decrease the status.
Also I found that as I didn't have any innovative things to say (due to being a bit isolated from the presence of other testers) I have failed to register as a speaker to some of the most expected conferences. Namely the Let's test! 2013. I hope that this course in addition to the like-minded people attending will wake up the sleeping beast within me to get cracking on the testing stuff again.
As for the course, me having attended it once before, I feel I'm in a different position than ones that haven't attended the course. I feel I have to know all the stuff better than any. But instead of being disheartened, I believe I can turn this into an asset. To have some distance to the subject might even make the event better for me. I have had the time to challenge the previous stuff and to filter out what doesn't fit into my daily work.
I mentioned that I haven't done hands on testing for few months. That doesn't mean that I have not used the exploratory testing principles to guide my work. As a maintenance manager I need to be able to grasp the concept of the issue really quickly to determine the proper course of actions to take. I have used the heuristic approach and namely the CIDTESTD-heuristics to guide through the first parts of the case analysis. Also as I need to know what goes out of the company, I need to sometimes do some testing for the implementation done by the developers. They are usually tested thoroughly but this is to give me a grasp of what has been done and how it actually works.
So I believe that when James invited me to join the course, it was the best thing that could happen to me even though the learning doesn't directly support my testing. More so I'm really expecting to have good chats with the James and other attendees of the course. I know at least that Aleksis is coming and it's great to see them both in person! This is gonna be a ride to remember! :)
Like I mentioned in Twitter: A gallon of coffee and some pastry should get the man ticking.
1 comment:
So far, so good.
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