2019 in review

It’s almost unbelievable that it’s time to close out my blogging for the year already! I published 13 blog posts during 2019, right on my target cadence of a post per month but down in number from 2017 and 2018. In terms of traffic, my blog attracted a very similar number of views to 2018 and I closed out the year with 1,000 followers on Twitter for the first time.

If there are particular topics you’d like to see me talking about here (especially to encourage more new readers), please feel free to reach out.

Working at Quest

I reached a milestone during 2019, notching up twenty years at Quest! It’s been an amazing journey since I started here in 1999 as a new migrant from the UK to Australia and I continue to enjoy a varied role working with dedicated people around the world. I travelled extensively again during the year and visited our folks in China, Austin (Texas) and the Czech Republic. The regular opportunities to travel and work with people from different cultures remains one of the most enjoyable (and sometimes most challenging!) aspects of my role.

I spent more time through 2019 helping teams to improve their agility, while still assisting widely around testing. As Quest modernizes both in terms of its products (e.g. new SaaS offerings) and processes, there is plenty to keep me busy helping the teams to deal with the different demands of more frequent delivery.

Conferences & meetups

I had another quieter year in terms of conference and meetup attendance. While I didn’t speak at a conference in 2019, I was lucky enough to co-organize the Association for Software Testing‘s third Australian conference, Testing in Context Conference Australia 2019 (TiCCA19). Working with Paul Seaman, we put together an excellent programme and the fifty-or-so delegates gave very positive feedback on what we offered. Although we had hoped to continue the TiCCA event as an annual conference, our small delegate numbers and ongoing challenges in attracting sponsorship unfortunately made it impossible for us to commit to the continuation of the event. It’s sad that we couldn’t build a sustainable true context-driven testing conference in a city as large as Melbourne, but Paul and I are happy to have tried hard with both CASTx18 and TiCCA19 providing great content for our local community.

The only other conference I attended was a non-IT event and something very different in many ways, the Animal Activists Forum in Melbourne. I contrasted the experience of attending this conference against the typical testing/IT conferences I’ve attended in my blog post, A very different conference experience.

I made it to a couple of meetups, the first being a pre-conference meetup we organized around TiCCA19. This meetup was enjoyable to organize and attend, featuring an excellent presentation by Aaron Hodder and a panel session with four TiCCA19 conference speakers – in the shape of Graeme Harvey, Aaron, Sam Connelly and Ben Simo – ably facilitated by Rich Robinson. The second meetup I attended was one of the high-quality Software Art Thou? series and saw the UK’s Kevlin Henney talking on “What do you mean?” (which he quickly modified to “WTF do you mean?”).

Community work

It was disappointing to learn that EPIC Assist had decided to pull out of the Melbourne market during 2019, resulting in the end of the software testing training course Paul Seaman and I had been delivering through them, the EPIC TestAbility Academy.

We would still love to share our knowledge and experience of software testing (and IT more generally) in a community setting and we continue to look for a partner organization to make this happen.

Other stuff

I’ve found myself reading a lot more books during 2019, a very welcome return to something I really enjoy and a useful way to reduce screen time (yes, I’m a physical book reader!). Many of the books came from the library and we are blessed with an excellent service in Melbourne (they purchased a number of books I requested through the year). Some of the books were purchased and shared with others in my office. I didn’t read testing books per se, but I became very interested in the subject of algorithms, AI and so on, reading a number of books in this area. Other areas of focus were leadership and knowledge acquisition.

I’ve also been spending more time to educate myself around animal rights and veganism, plus contributing in small ways to animal rights advocacy. It’s been an interesting change of tack to read books on these topics and also to see the reactions to my posts, tweets, etc. when this is the subject matter rather than my usual content! A handy summary of my thoughts around some of this can be found in my post, What becoming vegan taught me about software testing.

I hit another milestone early in 2019 when I acquired my first smartphone! I still find the form factor challenging and it seems unlikely I’ll ever become addicted to my phone, but I admit that it can be very handy when out and about – and Google Maps on the go during our travels made life a lot easier (though I was surprised offline maps don’t work in China, not a huge issue as we don’t drive there and taxis are incredibly cheap).

It felt like I had a much heavier workload during 2019 as well as some hefty stints of travel, so my outside projects didn’t get as much attention as in the previous few years. But I was glad to have the opportunity to organize the TiCCA19 conference as well as turning some work travel commitments into enjoyable holidays to see some new and interesting places. This time last year I was hinting at a new (personal) testing-related project that I hoped to kick off in 2019 and, while this didn’t eventuate, the project is still alive and I fully expect to get it up and running in 2020!

Thanks to my readers here and also followers on other platforms, I wish you all a very Merry Christmas & Happy New Year, and I hope you enjoy my posts to come through 2020. (And, remember, please let me know if there are any topics you particular want me to express opinions on, I’m happy to take suggestions!)