All posts by Stephen Janaway

This is my website :)
Experiences, Presenting

Romanian Testing Conference 2014

1 Comment

Landscape Green v2

I’ve just got back from the Romanian Testing Conference which was held in Cluj-Napoca. It was a great couple of days, talking testing with a lot of new people, and some friends from the UK and further afield.

20140515_072435_Android

If you get the chance then I would definitely recommend the conference. There was a good mix of presenters and presentations, and the event was very professionally run. They even had their own RTC2014 branded cars!

20140514_135650_Android

I spoke about mobile software testing, and you can find my slides on this site. I also took mindmaps of as many sessions as I could, and I’ve added all of these to a ‘Live From….’ post which you can find here.

Next up, Nordic Testing Days in Tallinn  in a couple of weeks. I’m talking about ‘Testing Your Emotions’, which will be a change from the mobile software testing area that I normally present on. I’ll also try and live blog as much as possible from the event.

Testing

Live From The Romanian Testing Conference

2 Comments

I’m speaking at the Romanian Testing Conference today and I’ll make it along to as many sessions as I can. Check back for my mind maps throughout the day.

Next up, Rene Tuinhout talking about “Passionate Dating for Testers”. My mind map is here.

image

After lunch I gave my talk on “Mobile Testing, That’s Just A Smaller Screen, Right?”. Obviously there’s no mind map from me for that one. Here are my slides.

The session before lunch – “Continuous Integration for Mobile Test Automation”. Here’s the mind map.

image

Next up, “A Healthy Approach To Test Automation”. Here is my mind map.

image

First up, Tony Bruce, with “What Testers Do”. My mind map is here.

image

conferences, Eurostar, Experiences

Conferences, conferences, conferences

Leave a comment

At the start of this year I made a conscious decision to try and speak at more conferences. I think it’s important that those of us who feel happy standing up in front of crowds of people and talking about testing do so; it helps spread ideas and keeps things fresh. I also find it’s a great way of meeting new people, exchanging new ideas, and doing so while keeping the costs down 🙂

So, I’ve been making a real effort with my abstracts and submissions this year (a topic of a future blog post). And I think I’ve also got a bit lucky as well, since I’m speaking a few conferences this year. It’s all really rather exciting. The full list is below:

I’m really looking forward to it all. Hope to see you at one or two. Now I’d best get off and write all those presentations 🙂

conferences, Experiences, Testing

Live from Pipeline

1 Comment

I’m at the Pipeline continuous delivery conference today. I’ll try and mindmap as many sessions as possible and post updates here. Scroll down to see the earlier sessions.

It’s All About the People

Last up – Tomas Riha, talking about why its All About the People. A good presentation about moving to Continuous Delivery at VGT. My mind map is here.

image

Big Ideas, Small Company, Moderate Heresy

Next up, Big Ideas, Small Company, Moderate Heresy from Alex Wilson and Benji Weber from Unruly. A very interesting presentation on their approach, particularly their synchronous processes. My mind map is here.

image

Ship It!

Next up is Phil Wills from The Guardian, talking about “Ship It!”.

Here’s my mind map.

image

The Rational for Continuous Delivery

First up, The Rational for Continuous Delivery from Dave Farley.

Here is my mind map.

image

image

image

management, team

Incentivising Community Engagement?

23 Comments

I firmly believe that in order to be as effective as possible, testers need to engage with the software testing community. Learning from others, particularly outside of the companies where we work, makes us more rounded and better informed individuals. It enables us to inspire ourselves and our colleagues in ways that we could not otherwise.

Recently I’ve been wondering why more people do not engage with the community. What is stopping them, and how can we all help change this? We can explain how brilliant the wider community is, and we can give examples from our experience. We can send people to conferences and email round blog posts. What is that does not work?

What do we do about those within a team who do not want to interact? Those who do not see it as a good use of their time, and are not willing to spend time on community matters, even if that time is given to them by the company. Should we incentivise people to do so? At least in order to push them in the direction of the wider testing community, where hopefully they will get hooked? Or should we do the opposite? Is it a valid idea to make community engagement a part of people’s role description, and therefore penalise those who hold such positions and do not exhibit such engagement?

Or is there another way of persuading everyone that the software testing community is key to their personal development? I’d be interested to know what you think.

Experiences, Testing

Live from Testbash

2 Comments

I’m here at the awesome TestBash conference today. I’ll be posting updates here, hopefully some mindmaps too.

image

First up – Scott Barber. An excellent presentation about Managing Application Performance. My mind map is here.

Next up, Contextual Decision Making, from Mark Tomlinson. Great presentation with added spinning cats. Mindmap is here.

Jez Nicholson gave us some good tips on how to win developer friends and influence people.

Joep Schuurkes explained to us how to help a new tester to get a running start.

image

Context driven testing in an agile context from Huib Schoots. Some great stuff.

Bill Matthews kicked off the afternoon talking about Getting Out of the Testing Game.

image

Stephen Blower taught us how to inspire testers and what inspires him.

Iain McCowatt presented a great talk on changing our automation models.

image

Chris George gave us a great story from RedGate on how they improved a legacy automation suite.

And finally Keith Klain gave a great talk on how to talk to a CIO about testing.

image

image

And then 99 second talks, and that’s it. What a great day!

Experiences, mobile

Testing Android At Facebook

2 Comments

IMG_20140311_163507.jpg

I spent a very useful and interesting day at SIGIST on Tuesday, presenting a talk on mobile testing, and listening to a number of talks from other speakers.

Simon Stewart’s presentation on how they test they Facebook Android application was very interesting. There is no Android team at Facebook, with all feature development taking place in the same team, irrespective of the platform. This helps ensure that the offerings are consistent across platforms.

They make a lot of use of test automation, (something that Facebook are famous for), and this applies to Android as much as other platforms, in particular a focus on unit testing and functional test automation using Selendroid.

Facebook have two main guiding principles for their test automation:

  1. Signal > Coverage – ensure that the results of running tests are acted upon, and failing tests are fixed or removed.
  2. Speed > Coverage – ensuring nothing takes more than 10 minutes to run, and running tests in parallel.

Facebook also use a lot of dog-fooding and make use of Google’s Alpha and Beta test programs to ensure a wide coverage of devices and test scenarios, in particular to fill gaps between their primarily automated test strategy.

I drew a mind-map of the talk which explains everything in more detail. Click on the image to get the full size version.

IMG_20140314_092326.jpg

Experiences, podcast, Testing

Testing In the Pub Podcasts Are Here

1 Comment

Myself and Dan Ashby (@danashby04) have started a software testing podcast. It’s called Testing In the Pub, primarily because we spend time in the pub talking about testing, and we thought that others in the software testing community may be interested in hearing what we talk about.

We published the first episode yesterday, called “Reviewing the Conferences 2013”, which is about the conferences that we attended in 2013, and the main learnings we took from them.

Testing in the Pub has it’s own website, and, (Apple approval permitting), will be in iTunes very soon.

It’s be great if you had a listen and gave us some feedback. This is the first time we’ve done something like this, and so all feedback will help us make it better.

If you want to appear as a guest on one of the shows then let us know as well. We’d really like to make the podcasts as varied as possible so the more the merrier 🙂