2020 in review

It’s time to wrap up my blogging for the year again, after a quite remarkable 2020!

I published 22 blog posts during the year, a significant increase in output compared to the last few years (largely enabled by the change in my employment situation, but more on that later). My blog attracted about 50% more views than in 2019 and I’m very grateful for the amplification of my blog posts via their regular inclusion in lists such as 5Blogs, Testing Curator’s Testing Bits and Software Testing Weekly. November 2020 saw my blog receiving twice as many views as any other month since I started blogging back in 2014, mainly due to the popularity of my critique of two industry reports during that month.

I closed out the year with about 1,100 followers on Twitter, up around 10% over the year – this surprises me given the larger number of tweets around veganism I’ve posted during the year, often a cause of unfollowing!

COVID-19

It wouldn’t be a 2020 review blog without some mention of COVID-19, but I’m not going to dwell too much on it here. I count myself lucky in so many ways to have escaped significant impact from the pandemic. Living in regional Australia meant restrictions were never really too onerous (at least compared to metropolitan Melbourne), while I could continue working from home (until my COVID-unrelated retrenchment).

The only major inconvenience caused by the pandemic was somewhat self-inflicted when we made the unwise decision to travel to the UK in mid-March, arriving there just as restrictions kicked in. It was a stressful and expensive time finding a way back to Australia, but I’m very glad we escaped when we did to ride out the pandemic for the rest of the year at home in Australia. (I blogged about these interesting international travels here and here.)

The end of an era

My 21-year stint at Quest Software came to an end in August. It was an amazing journey with the company, the only job I’ve had since moving to Australia back in 1999! I consider myself lucky to have had such a great environment in which to learn and develop my passion for testing. Of course, the closing out of this chapter of my professional life took a while to adjust to but I’ve spent the time since then focusing on decompressing, helping ex-colleagues in their search for new opportunities, looking to new ventures (see below) and staying connected with the testing community – while also enjoying the freedoms that come with not working full-time in a high pressure corporate role.

Conferences and meetups

I started the year with plans to only attend one conference – in the shape of CAST in Austin – but 2020 had other ideas of course! While in-person conferences and meetups all disappeared from our radars, it was great to see the innovation and creativity that flowed from adversity – with existing conferences finding ways to provide virtual offerings, meetups going online and new conferences springing up to make the most of the benefits of virtual events.

Virtual events have certainly opened up opportunities for attendance and presenting to new people in our community. With virtual conferences generally being very affordable compared to in-person events (with lower registration costs and no travel & accommodation expenses), it’s been good to see different names on attendee lists and seeing the excitement and passion expressed by first-time conference attendees after these events. Similarly, there have been a lot of new faces on conference programmes with the opportunity to present now being open to many more people, due to the removal of barriers such as travelling and in-person public speaking. It feels like this new model has increased diversity in both attendees and presenters, so this is at least one positive out of the pandemic. I wonder what the conference landscape will look like in the future as a result of what organisers have learned during 2020. While there’s no doubt in my mind that we lose a lot of the benefits of a conference by not being physically present in the same place, there are also clear benefits and I can imagine a hybrid conference world emerging – I’m excited to see what develops in this area.

I only attended one meetup during the year, the DDD Melbourne By Night event in September during which I also presented a short talk, Testing Is Not Dead, to a largely developer audience. It was fun to present to a non-testing audience and my talk seemed to go down well. (I’m always open to sharing my thoughts around testing at meetups, so please let me know if you’re looking for a talk for your meetup.)

In terms of conferences, I participated in three events during the year. First up, I attended the new Tribal Qonf organised by The Test Tribe and this was my first experience of attending a virtual conference. The registration was ridiculously cheap for the great range of quality presenters on offer over the two-day conference and I enjoyed catching up on the talks via recordings (since the “live” timing didn’t really work for Australia).

In November, I presented a two-minute talk for the “Community Strikes The Soapbox” part of EuroSTAR 2020 Online. I was in my element talking about “Challenging The Status Quo” and you can see my presentation here.

Later in November, I was one of the speakers invited to participate in the inaugural TestFlix conference, again organised by The Test Tribe. This was a big event with over one hundred speakers, all giving talks of around eight minutes in length, with free registration. My talk was Testing Is (Still) Not Dead and I also watched a large number of the other presentations thanks to recordings posted after the live “binge” event.

The start of a new era

Starting a testing consultancy business

Following my unexpected departure from Quest, I decided that twenty five years of full-time corporate employment was enough for me and so, on 21st October, I launched my testing consultancy business, Dr Lee Consulting. I’m looking forward to helping different organisations to improve their testing and quality practices, with a solid foundation of context-driven testing principles. While paid engagements are proving elusive so far, I’m confident that my approach, skills and experience will find a home with the right organisations in the months and years ahead.

Publishing a testing book

As I hinted in my 2019 review post at this time last year, a project I’ve been working on for a while, both in terms of concept and content, finally came to fruition in 2020. I published my first testing book, An Exploration of Testers, on 7th October. The book contains contributions from different testers and a second edition is in the works as more contributions come in. All proceeds from sales of the book will go back into the testing community and I plan to announce how the first tranche of proceeds will be used early in 2021.

Volunteering for the UK Vegan Society

When I saw a call for new volunteers to help out the UK’s Vegan Society, I took the opportunity to offer some of my time and, despite the obvious timezone challenges, I’m now assisting the organisation (as one of their first overseas volunteers) with proofreading of internal and external communications. This is a different role in a different environment and I’m really enjoying working with them as a way to be more active in the vegan community.

Thanks to my readers here and also followers on other platforms, I wish you all a Happy New Year and I hope you enjoy my posts to come through 2021.

I’ll be continuing my ten-part blog series answering common questions around software testing (the first four parts of which are already live) but, please remember, I’m more than happy to take content suggestions so let me know if there are any topics you particularly want me to express opinions on.