Launching my testing consultancy, Dr Lee Consulting

As I mentioned in a recent blog post, I’ve been working on setting up my own software testing consultancy following my exit from Quest back in August.

I finally got all my ducks in a row and launched the business – Dr Lee Consulting – publicly on 21st October 2020!

I spent a few weeks focusing on business basics and refining the idea of what my consultancy should look like. I completed two of Pat Flynn‘s excellent courses in the process, viz. Will It Fly? (the book and companion course) and Smart From Scratch. Mindmaps were my friend during this ideation and refinement stage, and my thanks go to those connections I reached out to along the way for their valuable help and feedback.

Another great source of inspiration and ideas was the “Share What You Know Summit” run as a virtual event by Teach:able (on 22-24 September). This was an excellent three-day event and furnished me with some great tips around LinkedIn profile tweaks and ideas for content generation.

In terms of administrivia, I registered for an ABN and business name online, then purchased the corresponding domain name (business name and domain name need to closely match for a .com.au domain, unlike most other domain extensions). I built my website using a free WordPress site, mainly due to my familiarity with their platform after blogging there for many years. I’ll probably upgrade to a paid plan sometime soon to remove ads and allow me to more professionally map my domain to that site.

I feel like the time I invested in the ideation and refinement of the idea was well spent and I tried not to go overboard in perfecting my website – at some point you just need to pull the trigger and get the thing out there!

My aim has always been to share what I’ve learned about testing with other organizations and Dr Lee Consulting is now my vehicle to do this. While I realize I’m not the right fit for every organization, I hope there are organizations/teams out there who will see the value in my services – I’m ready and waiting to help!

Check out www.drleeconsulting.com.au for full details of my offering and how to contact me for a no obligation conversation about engaging my services.

Publishing my first testing book, “An Exploration of Testers”

As I mentioned in my last blog post, I’ve been working on a testing book for the last year-or-so. With more free time since leaving full-time employment back in August, I’m delighted to have now published my first e-book on testing, called An Exploration of Testers.

The book is formed of contributions from various testers around the world, with seventeen contributions in the first edition. Each tester answered the same set of eleven questions designed to tease out testing, career and life lessons. I was humbled by how much time and effort went into the contributions and also by how willing the community was to engage with the project, with almost every tester I invited to contribute then committing to doing so. A number of contributions will be added in the coming months (and additional versions of the book are free after your initial purchase, so don’t be afraid to buy now!).

My experience of using LeanPub as the publishing platform has been generally very good. When I was researching ways to self-publish, LeanPub seemed to get good reviews and it was free to try so I gave it a go, then ended up sticking with it. I’m still on the free plan and it suffices for now for this project. The platform makes most aspects of creating, publishing and selling a book really straightforward and the markdown language used for writing the manuscript is easy to learn (though sometimes comes with frustrating limitations on the control of layout). I would recommend LeanPub to others looking to write their first book.

At the very start of the project, I decided that any proceeds from sales of the book would be ploughed back into the testing community and this fact seemed to encourage participation in the project. I will be transparent about the money received from book sales (with the only expenses being those taken by LeanPub as the publishing & sales platform) and also where I decide to invest it back into our community. It seems only fair to give back to the community that has been so generous to me over the years and also generated the content for the book.

For more details and to buy a copy, please visit https://leanpub.com/anexplorationoftesters