Testing & Movies & Stuff

https://twitter.com/sdalfonzo I've had the very cool, very humbling opportunities of mentoring and coaching other IT folks over the last two years or so. The topics are varied but mostly I try to encourage the people I've spoken with or understand what they are struggling with and see if we can solution something out between the two of us. It's been pretty exciting for me to give back to the IT community in this way. When I was starting in IT, I had a lot of coaches, managers, and mentors who did various things to encourage me and help me deal with some tough situations. Working as a woman in tech can get very discouraging at times and many folks were there to help me through situations and roadblocks which might have resulted in me quitting IT all together. Without mentors and coaches, many of us wouldn't be were we are today. I was recently discussing with a mentee some difficulties they were having trying to find a way to be valuable on a team. There were la...

"We should seek the greatest value of our action." -Stephen Hawking  I've only done mob "anything " at conferences. It's a skill I've learned and I've been itching to try out for a while and have never found a good opportunity to try it. I recently got my chance to facilitate a mob testing session after I proposed the idea to my team.  Currently we are working on a mobile application. We had a few days left in our sprint and a couple of stories which needed to be tested. I suggested we do a mob testing session so we could work through the last few stories together as a team. The team liked the idea! I was ecstatic, and then quickly had to figure out how I wanted the session to proceed.  Assumptions I though the best way to get my team members to think about what they knew and communicate those thoughts to the other team members, was to write down assumptions we had about the application. I stole this idea from a recent twitter threa...

"You get to a certain age, and you are forbidden access. You're not going to get the kind of coverage that you would like in music magazines; you're not going to get played on radio, and you're not going to get played on television.  I have to survive on word of mouth." - David Bowie I can't say enough about the experiences I've had with Mark Tomlinson , Gem Hill , and Neil Studd . All these podcasts are serving the community of testers exceptionally well. I've been privileged to be on them and for the most part I've not put my foot in my mouth too much. Testers' Island Discs   I think the one exception to that, or three rather, was a couple of date flubs I made on Neil's Island Tester's podcast, and I reversed words at one point stating one thing and describing another. It's out there for folks to listen too. The mistake is glaring to me when I hear it and someone who appreciated my input reached out and asked me if I...