My first two (free!) testing community events of 2023

I’ve got a couple of testing community events coming up to kick off 2023. Both are free to attend and are interactive, so I’d love to see some of my blog audience getting involved!

30 January 2023 (8pm AEDT): Steel Yourselves webinar

First up is a webinar for the Association for Software Testing as part of their interesting series called “Steel Yourselves”, in which testers make the strongest case they can for claims they fundamentally disagree with.

In this webinar, I will argue the case for a testing phase, hence the title of my talk, “Shift Nowhere: a Testing Phase FTW”. After I make my case, the audience will have the chance to challenge my point of view and finally I’ll reflect on the experience of having to make a case for something I disagree with.

This webinar will also feature another well-respected Australian tester, with Anne-Marie Charrett presenting her case that “Crosby was Right. Quality is Free”.

I’m looking forward to this very different kind of webinar and have been busy putting my case together and practising my 10-minute presentation. It will certainly be interesting to deal with the challenges coming from the audience (“interesting” also encompassing “well out of my comfort zone”!).

Register for the AST Steel Yourselves webinar

8 March 2023 (9.30pm AEDT): Ask Me Anything on Exploratory Testing

My second online event is for The Test Tribe, as part of their “Ask Me Anything” series, in which I’ll be fielding audience questions about exploratory testing. This is a topic I’m passionate about and I have extensive experience of using exploratory testing as an approach, so I hope I can help others get a better understanding of the approach and its power during this session.

This is again something quite different for me as I generally present a prepared presentation of some kind, whereas in this case I don’t know what the audience will ask. I expect this to be quite a challenging experience but I’m excited to share my knowledge and experience on this oft-misunderstood topic.

Register for The Test Tribe AMA

I hope you can join me on the 30th January for “Steel Yourselves” and also on 8th March for “Ask Me Anything”! Please use the following links to register:

Register for the AST Steel Yourselves webinar

Register for The Test Tribe AMA

2022 in review

It feels like much less than a year since I was penning my review of 2021, but the calendar doesn’t lie so it really is time to take the opportunity to review my 2022.

I published just 10 blog posts this year, so didn’t quite meet my personal target cadence of a post every month. There were a few reasons for this, the main one being my unexpected re-entry into employment (more on that below). Perhaps due to my more limited output, my blog traffic dropped by about 40% compared to 2021. I continue to be grateful for the amplification of my blog posts via their regular inclusion in lists such as 5Blogs and Software Testing Weekly.

March was the biggest month for my blog by far this year, thanks to a popular post about a video detailing how testers should fake experience to secure roles. I note in writing this blog post now that the video in question has been removed from YouTube, but no doubt there are similar videos doing the rounds that encourage inexperienced testers to cheat and misrepresent themselves – to the detriment of both themselves and the reputation of our industry.

I again published a critique of an industry report in November (after publishing similar critiques in 2020 and 2021) and this was my second most popular post of the year, so it’s good to see the considerable effort that goes into these critique-style posts being rewarded by good engagement.

I closed out the year with about 1,200 followers on Twitter, steady year on year, but maybe everyone will leave Twitter soon if the outrage many are expressing recently isn’t fake!

Work life

For the first few months of 2022, I continued doing a small amount of consulting work through my own business, Dr Lee Consulting. It was good to work directly with clients to help solve testing challenges and I was encouraged by their positive feedback.

Quite unexpectedly, an ex-colleague from my days at Quest persuaded me to interview at SSW, the consultancy he joined after Quest. A lunch with the CEO and some formalities quickly led to an offer to become SSW’s first Test Practice Lead (on a permanent part-time basis). I’ve now been with SSW for about seven months and it’s certainly been an interesting journey so far!

The environment is quite different from Quest. Firstly, SSW is a consultancy rather than a product company and I’ve come to realise how different the approach is in the consulting world compared to the product world. Secondly, SSW is a small Australian company compared to Quest being a large international one, so meetings are all standard working hours (and I certainly don’t miss the very early and very late meetings that so frequently formed part of my Quest working day!).

I have been warmly welcomed across SSW and I’m spreading the word on good testing internally, as well as working directly with some of SSW’s clients to improve their approaches to testing and quality management.

Testing-related events

As I announced mid-2021, I was excited to be part of the programme for the in-person Testing Talks 2021 (The Reunion) conference in Melbourne, rescheduled for October 2022. Unfortunately, I had to give up my spot on the programme due to my COVID vaccination status – though, surprise surprise, all such restrictions had been removed by the time the event actually took place. But I did attend the conference and it was awesome to see so many people in the one place for a testing event, after the hiatus thanks to the pandemic and the incredibly harsh restrictions that resulted for Melbourne. (I blogged about my experience of attending Testing Talks 2022.)

In terms of virtual events, I was fortunate to be invited to act as a peer advisor for one of Michael Bolton’s virtual RST classes running in the Australian timezone. This was an awesome three-day experience and I enjoyed interacting with the students as well as sharpening my understanding of some of the RST concepts from Michael’s current version of the class.

Two very enjoyable virtual events came courtesy of the Association for Software Testing (AST) and their Lean Coffees. I participated in the May and September events suited to my timezone and they were enlightening and fun, as well as offering a great way to engage with other testers in an informal online setting.

I had an enjoyable conversation with James Bach too, forming part of his “Testing Voices” series on the Rapid Software Testing YouTube channel:

Although I’ve interacted with James online and also in person several times (especially during his visits to Melbourne), this was our most in-depth conversation to date and it was fun to talk about my journey into testing, my love of mathematics and my approach to testing. I appreciate James’s continued passion for testing and, in particular, his desire to move the craft forward.

Testing books

I didn’t publish an updated version of my book An Exploration of Testers during 2022, but may do in 2023.  I’m always open to additional contributions to this book, so please contact me if you’re interested in telling your story via the answers to the questions posed in the book!

I made good progress on the free AST e-book, Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester though. This book provides responses to common questions and statements about testing from a context-driven perspective, with its content being crowdsourced from the membership of the AST and the broader testing community. I added a further 10 responses in 2022, bringing the total to 16. I will continue to ask for contributions about once a month in 2023. The book is available from the AST’s GitHub.

Podcasting

Paul Seaman, Toby Thompson and I kicked off The 3 Amigos of Testing podcast in 2021 and produced three episodes in that first year, but we failed to reconvene to produce more content in 2022. There were a number of reasons for this, but we did get together to work up our next episode recently, so expect our next podcast instalment to drop in early 2023!

Volunteering for the UK Vegan Society

I’ve continued to volunteer with the UK’s Vegan Society both as a proofreader and also contributing to their web research efforts. I’ve learned a lot about SEO as a result of the web-related tasks and I undertook an interesting research project on membership/join pages to help the Society to improve its pages around joining with the aim of increasing new memberships.

I really enjoy working with The Vegan Society, increasing my contribution to and engagement with the vegan community worldwide. It was particularly rewarding and humbling to be awarded “Volunteer of the Season” and be featured in the Society’s member magazine, The Vegan, towards the end of the year.

In closing

As always, I’m grateful for the attention of my readers here and also followers on other platforms. I wish you all a Happy New Year and I hope you enjoy my posts and other contributions to the testing community to come through 2023 – the first public opportunity to engage with me in 2023 will be the AST’s Steel Yourselves webinar on January 30, when I’ll be arguing the case for a testing phase, I hope to “see you” there!

Interview with Rob Sabourin for McGill University undergraduates (8th November 2022)

Thanks to the wonders of modern communication technology, I was interviewed by Rob Sabourin as part of his course on Software Engineering Practice for McGill University undergraduates in Montreal, Canada.

I took part in a small group interview with McGill students back in February 2016, as I wrote about in my blog post, A small contribution to the next generation of software engineering professionals I did another interview in April 2022 for the same Software Engineering Practice course and was more than happy to repeat that experience when Rob invited me to join his Fall cohort.

The early evening timeslot for Rob’s lecture on “Estimation” was perfect for me in Australia and I sat in on the lecture piece before my interview.

I’ve spent a lot of time in Rob’s company over the years, in both personal and professional settings, watching him give big keynote presentations, workshops, meetup group talks and so on. But I’d never witnessed his style in the university lecture setting so it was fascinating to watch him in action with his McGill students. He covered the topic very well, displaying his deep knowledge of the history of software engineering to take us from older approaches such as function point analysis, through to agile and estimating “at the last responsible moment”. Rob talked about story points (pointing out that they’re not an agile version of function points!) and estimating via activities such as planning poker. He also covered T-shirt sizing as an alternative approach, before wrapping up his short lecture with some ideas around measuring progress (e.g. burndown charts). Rob’s depth of knowledge was clear, but he presented this material in a very pragmatic and accessible way, perfectly pitched for an undergraduate audience.

With the theory over, it was time for me to be in the hot seat – for what ended up being about 50 minutes! Rob structured the interview by walking through the various steps of the Scrum lifecycle, asking me about my first-person experience of all these moving parts. He was especially interested in my work with Scrum teams in highly-distributed teams (including Europe, Israel, US, China and Australia) and how these team structures impacted the way we did Scrum. It was good to share my experiences and present a “real world” version of agile in practice for the students to compare and contrast with the theory.

It was a lot of fun spending time with Rob in this setting and I thank him & his students for their engagement and questions. I’m always open to sharing my knowledge and experience, it’s very rewarding and the least I can do given all the help I’ve had along the journey that is my career so far (including from Rob himself).

ER: acting as a Rapid Software Testing Explored “peer advisor” (7-10 February 2022)

A relatively rare scheduling of the online version of the Rapid Software Testing Explored course for Australasian timezones presented me with an invitation from presenter Michael Bolton to act as a “peer advisor” for the course running from 7-10 February.

I had already participated in RST twice before, thanks to in-person classes with Michael in Canada back in 2007 and then again with James Bach in Melbourne in 2011, so the opportunity to experience the class online and in its most current form were both very appealing. I was quick to accept Michael’s offer to volunteer for the duration of the course.

While the peer advisor role is voluntary and came with no obligation to attend for any particular duration, I made room in my consulting schedule to attend every session over the four days (with the consistent afternoon scheduling making this a practical option for me). Each afternoon consisted of three 90-minute sessions with two 30-minute breaks, making a total of 18 hours of class time. The class retailed at AU$600 for paying participants so offers incredible value in its virtual format, in my opinion.

As a a peer advisor, I added commentary here and there during Michael’s sessions but contributed more during exercises in the breakout rooms, nudging the participants as required to help them. I was delighted to be joined by Paul Seaman and Aaron Hodder as peer advisors, both testers I have huge respect for and who have made significant contributions to the context-driven testing community. Eugenio Elizondo did a sterling job as PA, being quick to provide links to resources, etc. as well as keeping on top of the various administrivia required to run a smooth virtual class.

The class was attended by over twenty students from across Australia, New Zealand and Malaysia. Zoom was used for all of Michael’s main sessions with breakout rooms being used to split the participants into smaller groups for exercises (with the peer advisors roaming these rooms to assist as needed). Asynchronous collaboration was facilitated via a Mattermost instance (an open source Slack clone), which seemed to work well for posing questions to Michael, documenting references, general chat between participants, etc.

While no two runs of an RST class are the same, all the “classic” content was covered over the four days, including testing & checking, heuristics & oracles, the heuristic test strategy model & product coverage outlines, shallow & deep testing, session-based test management, and “manual” & “automated” testing. The intent is not to cover a slide deck but rather to follow the energy in the (virtual) room and tailor the content to maximize its value to the particular group of participants. This nature of the class meant that even during this third pass through it, I still found the content fresh, engaging and valuable – and it really felt like the other participants did too.

The various example applications used throughout the class are generally simple but reveal complexity (and I’d seen all of them before, I think). It was good to see how other participants dealt with the tasks around testing these applications and I enjoyed nudging them along in the breakouts to explore different ways of thinking about the problems at hand.

The experience of RST in an online format was of course quite different to an in-person class. I missed the more direct and instant feedback from the faces and body language of participants (not everyone decided to have their video turned on either) and I imagine this also makes this format challenging for the presenter. I wondered sometimes whether there was confusion or misunderstanding that lay hidden from obvious view, in a way that wouldn’t happen so readily if everyone was physically present in the same room. Michael’s incredibly rich, subtle and nuanced use of language is always a joy for me, but I again wondered if some of this richness and subtlety was lost especially for participants without English as their first language.

The four hefty afternoons of this RST class passed so quickly and I thoroughly enjoyed both the course itself as well as the experience of helping out in a small way as a peer advisor. It was fun to spend some social time with some of the group after the last session in a “virtual pub” where Michael could finally enjoy a hard-earned beer! The incredible pack of resources sent to all participants is also hugely valuable and condenses so much learned experience and practical knowledge into forms well suited to application in the day-to-day life of a tester.

Since I first participated in RST back in 2007, I’ve been a huge advocate for this course and experiencing the online version (and seeing the updates to its content over the last fifteen years) has only made my opinions even stronger about the value and need for this quality of testing education. In a world of such poor messaging and content around testing, RST is a shining light and a source of hope – take this class if you ever have the chance (check out upcoming RST courses)!

(I would like to publicly offer my thanks to Michael for giving me the opportunity to act as a peer advisor during this virtual RST class – as I hope I’ve communicated above, it was an absolute pleasure!)

2021 in review

As another year draws to a close, I’ll take the opportunity to review my 2021.

I published 14 blog posts during the year, just about meeting my personal target cadence of a post every month. I wrapped up my ten-part series answering common search engine questions about testing and covered several different topics during my blogging through the year. My blog attracted about 25% more views than in 2020, somewhat surprisingly, and I continue to be really 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.

December 2021 has been the biggest month for my blog by far this year with a similar number of views to my all-time high back in November 2020 – interestingly, I published a critique of an industry report in December and published similar critiques in November 2020, so clearly these types of posts are popular (even if they can be somewhat demoralizing to write)!

I closed out the year with about 1,200 followers on Twitter, again up around 10% over the year.

Conferences and meetups

2021 was my quietest year for perhaps fifteen years in terms of conferences and meetups, mainly due to the ongoing impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic around the world.

I was pleased to announce mid-2021 that I would be speaking at the in-person Testing Talks 2021 (The Reunion) conference in Melbourne in October. Sadly, the continuing harsh response to the pandemic in this part of the world made an in-person event too difficult to hold, but hopefully I can keep that commitment for its rescheduled date in 2022.

I didn’t participate in any virtual or remote events during the entire year.

Consulting

After launching my testing consultancy, Dr Lee Consulting, towards the end of 2020, I noted in last year’s review post that “I’m confident that my approach, skills and experience will find a home with the right organisations in the months and years ahead.” This confidence turned out to be well founded and I’ve enjoyed working with my first clients during 2021.

Consulting is a very different gig to full-time permanent employment but it’s been great so far, offering me the opportunity to work in different domains with different types of organizations while also allowing me the freedom to enjoy a more relaxed lifestyle. I’m grateful to those who have put their faith (and dollars!) in me during 2021 as I begin my consulting journey and I’m looking forward to helping more organizations to improve their testing and quality practices during 2022.

Testing books

After publishing my first testing book in October 2020, in the shape of An Exploration of Testers, it’s been pleasing to see a steady stream of sales through 2021. I made my first donation of proceeds to the Association for Software Testing (AST) from sales of the book and another donation will follow early in 2022. I also formalized an arrangement with the AST so that all future proceeds will be donated to them and all new & existing members will receive a free copy of the book. (I’m open to additional contributions to this book, so please contact me if you’re interested in telling your story via the answers to the questions posed in the book!)

I started work on another book project in 2021, also through the AST. Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester provides responses to common questions and statements about testing from a context-driven perspective, with its content being crowdsourced from the membership of the AST and the broader testing community. There are responses to six questions in the book so far and I’m adding another response every month (or so). The book is available for free from the AST’s GitHub.

Podcasting

It was fun to kick off a new podcasting venture with two good mates from the local testing industry, Paul Seaman and Toby Thompson. We’ve produced three episodes of The 3 Amigos of Testing podcast so far and aim to get back on the podcasting horse early in 2022 to continue our discussions around automation started back in August. The process of planning content for the podcast, discussing and dry-running it, and finally recording is an interesting one and kudos to Paul for driving the project and doing the heavy lifting around editing and publishing each episode.

Volunteering for the UK Vegan Society

I’ve continued to volunteer with the UK’s Vegan Society and, while I’ve worked on proofreading tasks again through the year, I’ve also started contributing to their web research efforts over the last six months or so.

It was exciting to be part of one of the Society’s most significant outputs of 2021, viz. the Planting Value in the Food System report. This 40,000-word report was a mammoth research project and my work in proofing it was also a big job! The resulting report and the website are high quality and show the credibility of The Vegan Society in producing well-researched reference materials in the vegan space.

Joining the web research volunteer group immediately gave me the opportunity to learn, being tasked with leading the research efforts around green websites and accessibility testing.

I found the green website research particularly engaging, as it was not an area I’d even considered before and the carbon footprint of websites – and how it can easily be reduced – doesn’t seem to (yet) be on the radar of most companies. The lengthy recommendations resulting from my research in this area will inform changes to the Vegan Society website over time and this work has inspired me to look into offering advice in this area to companies who may have overlooked this potentially significant contributor to their carbon footprint.

I also spent considerable time investigating website accessibility and tooling to help with development & testing in this area. While accessibility testing is something I was tangentially aware of in my testing career, the opportunity to deep dive into it was great and, again, my recommendations will be implemented over time to improve the accessibility of the society’s own website.

I continue to enjoy working with The Vegan Society, increasing my contribution to and engagement with the vegan community worldwide. The passion and commitment of the many volunteers I interact with is invigorating. I see it as my form of vegan activism and a way to utilize my existing skills in research and the IT industry as well as gaining valuable new skills and knowledge along the way.

Status Quo projects

I was honoured to be asked to write a lengthy article for the Status Quo official fan club magazine, FTMO, following the sad passing of the band’s original bass player, Alan Lancaster in September. Alan spent much of his life here in Australia, migrating to Sydney in 1978 and he was very active in the music industry in this country following his departure from Quo in the mid-1980s. It was a labour of love putting together a 5000-word article and selecting interesting photos to accompany it from my large collection of Quo scrapbooks.

I spent time during 2021 on a new Quo project too, also based around my scrapbook collection. This project should go live in 2022 and has been an interesting learning exercise, not just in terms of website development but also photography. Returning to coding after a 20+ year hiatus has been a challenge but I’m reasonably happy with the simple website I’ve put together using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP and a MySQL database. Gathering the equipment and skills to take great photos of scrapbook clippings has also been fun and it’s nice to get back into photography, a keen hobby of mine especially in my university days back in the UK.

In closing

As always, I’m grateful for the attention of my readers here and also followers on other platforms. I wish you all a Happy New Year and I hope you enjoy my posts and other contributions to the testing community to come through 2022!

A year has gone…

Almost unbelievably, it’s now been a year since I left my long stint at Quest Software. It’s been a very different year for me than any of the previous 25-or-so spent in full-time employment in the IT industry. The continuing impact of COVID-19 on day-to-day life in my part of the world has also made for an unusual 12 months in many ways.

While I haven’t missed working at Quest as much as I expected, I’ve missed the people I had the chance to work with for so long in Melbourne and I’ve also missed my opportunities to spend time with the teams in China that I’d built up such a strong relationship with over the last few years (and who, sadly, have all since departed Quest as well as their operations there were closed down this year).

I’ve deliberately stayed fairly engaged with the testing community during this time, including giving a talk at at meetup, publishing my first testing book, launching my own testing consultancy business, and blogging regularly (including a ten-part blog series answering the most common search engine questions around testing).

Starting to work with my first clients in a consulting capacity is an interesting experience with a lot of learning opportunities. I plan to blog on some of my lessons learned from these early engagements later in the year.

Another fun and testing-related project kicked off in May, working with my good friends from the industry, Paul Seaman and Toby Thompson, to start The 3 Amigos of Testing podcast. We’ve always caught up regularly to chat about testing and life in general over a cold one or two, and this new podcast has given us plenty of opportunities to talk testing again, albeit virtually. A new episode of this podcast should drop very soon after this blog post.

On more personal notes, I’ve certainly been finding more time for myself since ending full-time employment. There are some non-negotiables, such as daily one-hour (or more) walks and meditation practice, and I’ve also been prioritizing bike riding and yoga practice. I’ve been reading a lot too – more than a book a week – on a wide variety of different topics. These valuable times away from technology are foundational in helping me to live with much more ease than in the past.

I’ve continued to do volunteer work with The Vegan Society (UK). I started off performing proofreading tasks and have also now joined their web volunteers’ team where I’ve been leading research projects on how to reduce the carbon footprint of the Society’s website and also to improve its accessibility. These web research projects have given me the welcome opportunity to learn about areas that I was not very familiar with before, the “green website” work being particularly interesting and it has inspired me to pursue other opportunities in this area (watch this space!). A massive proofreading task led to the recent publication of the awesome Planting Value in the Food System reports, with some deep research and great ideas for transitioning UK farming away from animal-based agriculture.

Looking to the rest of 2021, the only firm commitment I have in the testing space – outside of consulting work – is an in-person conference talk at Testing Talks 2021 in Melbourne. I’ll be continuing with my considerable volunteering commitment with the Vegan Society and I have a big Status Quo project in the works too! With little to no prospect of long-distance travel in Australia or overseas in this timeframe, we will enjoy short breaks locally between lockdowns and also press on with various renovation projects on our little beach house.

(Given the title of this blog, I can’t waste this opportunity to include a link to one of my favourite Status Quo songs, “A Year” – this powerful ballad morphs into a heavier piece towards the end, providing some light amongst the heaviness of its parent album, “Piledriver”. Enjoy!)

Donation of proceeds from sales of “An Exploration of Testers” book

In October 2020, I published my first software testing book, “An Exploration of Testers”. As I mentioned then, one of my intentions with this project was to generate some funds to give back to the testing community (with 100% of all proceeds I receive from book sales being returned to the community).

I’m delighted to announce that I’ve now made my first donation as a result of sales so far, based on royalties for the book in LeanPub to date:

(Note that there is up to a 45-day lag between book sales and my receipt of those funds, so some recent sales are not included in this first donation amount.)

I’ve personally rounded up the royalties paid so far (US$230.93) to form a donation of US$250 (and covered their processing fees) to the Association for Software Testing for use in their excellent Grant Program. I’m sure these funds will help meetup and peer conference organizers greatly in the future.

I will make further donations of royalties received from book sales not covered by this first donation.

“An Exploration of Testers” is available for purchase via LeanPub and a second edition featuring more contributions from great testers around the world should be coming soon. My thanks to all of the contributors so far for making the book a reality and also to those who’ve purchased a copy, without whom this valuable donation to the AST wouldn’t have been possible.

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.

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

Pre-launch announcements for my new projects

After six weeks or so of resetting following my unplanned exit from Quest, I’m getting close to publicly announcing more details on a couple of new projects.

One of these has been in the making for about a year, while the other has arisen as a direct result of leaving full-time employment.

I’ve always been drawn to the idea of writing a book and I will finally realize this idea with the release of a testing-related e-book very soon. It’s been a highly collaborative effort with input from many members of the testing community. Having more free time since finishing up at Quest has given me the opportunity to wrap up what I think is worthy of publishing as a first edition. I will return all proceeds from sales of this book to the testing community. Look out for more details of the book via this blog and my social media presences in the coming weeks!

My other project is a new boutique software testing consultancy business. The intention is to offer something quite different in the consulting space, utilizing my skills and experience from the last twenty years to help organizations to improve their testing practices. This consultancy won’t suit everyone but I hope that my niche offering will both help those who see the value in the way I think about testing and also give me the chance to share my knowledge and experience in a meaningful way outside of full-time corporate employment. I expect to launch this business before the end of the year, but feel free to express interest in securing my services now if you believe that my thinking around software testing could be of value in your organization. Note that I will not be making myself available full-time (as I’m deliberately carving out time for volunteer work and to focus on my wellbeing), so now is a good time to secure some of my limited future availability before the formal launch of the consultancy. Again, keep an eye on this blog and my socials for more details of the testing consultancy project.