AI has been an increasingly dominant part of our discussions and working lives. Like it or not, we are pushed to use it. I find it both exciting and worrying. The obvious concern is loss of jobs but AI is unlikely to ever be a worthy replacement for my skillset. That isn’t to say that […]
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The woe of retry
Upon the red light I do wail, for my test case has reported fail.
Is it a bug or test issue, I do not know.
My log download has been so slow.
I would enter a well written defect,
But tech debt does not get enough respect.
The only choice fills me with an uncertain fear,
However re-running may make my pipeline clear.
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2025 Reflections
From a professional viewpoint, it has been an interesting and largely enjoyable year – despite a huge setback. I’ve done quite a lot of cool things: I’ve also been able to start a few interesting things: With that in mind, I have to feel like it has been a good year. That said, ultimately I’m […]
Sketchnotes and thoughts on “Ensuring quality for a peculiar piece of software” by Joep Schuurkes
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Adventures into ATDD
When reading into Scrum & LeSS (the scrum-based framework we used), it was clear that we weren’t doing anywhere near as much refinement as was recommended. It was understandable and on the face of it, we didn’t think that we were doing a bad job. However we kept working in spaces that we didn’t understand […]
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Reaction: GenAI Wars Episode 3
Sketchnotes and thoughts on the MoTaCon talk “GenAI Wars Episode 3: Return of the explorer” by Martin Hynie.
This year I started doing my first 1:1s with colleagues, aside from those with my manager/leader. It was a really interesting experience and I wanted to reflect on it a little. Getting going It was actually something that was on my agenda for a while but struggled to get permission / buy in to do […]
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Challenging our thinking with CBT
Quite a few years ago I was going through a tough time and was referred to “Cognitive Behaviour Therapy” (CBT). Whilst it wasn’t what I needed at the time, it was useful for helping me correct some of my negative behaviours or reactions. Recently when working my way through MoT Software Testing Essentials Certificate (STEC), […]
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Researching Education
One of my favourite things from being a quality coach was having 1:1s with people, tapping into their views on quality, what motivates them and their experiences plus of course exploring how to support them. However there was an interesting trend – quality was new to many people. Just like it was new to me […]
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Role of Automation
As Philippa Jennings articulated in her talk at MoTaCon, quality is the goal. Automation is a means. Unfortunately some people do get that muddled. Even worse is mistaking using a tool with quality. Eek! I love automation for three reasons. First is unit testing. That super fast feedback when I’m writing code is handy and […]