After a short vacation we’ve resumed workshops in our testing meetup!

Quick notes below.

Job Finding Club

• Albert Gareev gave a quick intro on our community services to the newly joined members
• Kraig Lenehan reviewed resumes and advised members in private
• Coming up – practice interviews! This is a rare opportunity, and places will be very limited. If you want to receive a feedback from QA managers and leads interviewing you “for real” but in the safe setting hurry to sign up. Stay ready, stay tuned, details will be available soon.

Lean Coffee

This part took the longest time, and brought a lot of interesting experiences for me (as a facilitator) and for our group. It also turned up to be very fruitful. We’ve managed to cover 6 topics in about hour and a half. We’ve got quite a few takeaways – I’m referencing them below.

Top questions for discussion (original phrasing retained)

• What company / project size requires to have testers
• QTP Automation Testing
• How to get into a career in software testing
• Agile best practices
• Writing TCs for yourself vs. hypothetical new tester
• How to document test cases
• Who comes up with testing procedures? PM or testers?
• QA interview questions and how to pass interview
• Testing vs. checking
• Kanban and Scrum
• What is back-end testing
• Working with off-shore (or 3rd party) development teams
• Popular automation tools
• Coverage statements
• Basics of testing
• Writing new TCs vs reusing TCs
• Using JIRA
• What is Lean
• Selenium

Resources

• Agile and Testing:  Øredev 2014 session: Integrating Skilled Testing with Agile Development by James Bach
• Testing and Checking: Testing and Checking Refined by Michael Bolton, James Bach
• Test Cases: Cases are Not Testing: Toward a Performance Culture by James Bach
• Lean Coffee: What is Lean Coffee?
• Kanban: Personal Kanban 101
• Scrum: What is Scrum?
• “Shift Left”: The Evolving Role of QA
• What to do about tester’s portfolio: Becoming a Software Testing Expert, Buccaneer-Tester: Winning Your Reputation
• How to get testing experience: weekendtesting.com and utest.com were mentioned
• Context-Driven Testing: I suggest to google it, study history and read modern debates. Something from the times when I got to know about CDT – Context-Driven Methodology
• Training and courses: Black Box Software Testing, Rapid Software Testing

Extreme Testing

There’s a real-time card game perfect for practicing abilities to find patterns (remember blink testing?), think and reason quickly, focus and de-focus. It’s called SET. This was the first time I introduced it at the meetup but certainly not last. Who knows maybe soon we’ll have competitions with prizes ;)