I had a blast at Australian Testing Days Conference in Sydney on Friday. It’s always good to get reconnected with some colleagues and to make new connections. First up we had Jennie Naylor go over how to use OKR’s to drive the Quality Onwership: The OKR (Objectives and Key Results) framework has been in use since […]
Category Archives: Technology
Ditch that intro slide
Australian Testing days is off to an awesome start. I always enjoy the community vibe at these events. However there’s tons of poorly designed slide decks out there. Here’s some advice. Ditch the intro slide with your picture on it. The audience doesn’t care and we know what you look like. You are standing right […]
Getting Started with Google Cloud, App Script and BigQuery
The humble spreadsheet is one of the most versatile digital tools that any tester has in their toolkit. I’m working on a data analytics project at InsightTimer where we are doing event tracking across our android and iOS apps using MParticle and BigQuery. I want to do some data analyst on the events coming through […]
Sydney Testers and Money
We have a Sydney Testers evening with James Bach coming up soon and you might be curious to know why we are charging $5 for it when it seems we have a sponsor for the event (Campaign Monitor). There are actually a few reasons to try this model that I will explain in detail. Ongoing […]
What’s with the coach titles?
Agile, Quality, Life, Career … everyone wants to be some sort coach these days. I don’t like the term coach. I feel like it downplays the hard work that goes into teaching. I learn and I teach what I learn. I love teaching so much I often do it for free. During uni I volunteered […]
Personal Branding
Warning: This blog contains promotional content. Personal branding is all about that, what else did you expect? We had a pretty awesome CV clinic for Sydney Testers yesterday held at Opus Recruitment Solutions. Barry Smith and Mike Hollowbread specialise in recruitment for software testers and went through their pointers for CVs. These guys see a lot […]
Getting started with GCloud, MySQL and the Command line
I’ve put together this guide for how I connect to my MySQL instance using google cloud after this tweet from @ddiversion: Would you know of any good resources to learn command line SQL queries (from connecting to a db to running SELECT queries, the whole thing)? Thanks! — skae (@ddiversion) August 2, 2018 Google cloud […]
So you want to become more technical?
Here is my 5 step guide for becoming more technical without learning to code. No matter what your background, if you follow these steps you will be more hands on technical than I was when I first graduated from Computer Science at Uni. NOTE: If you are a software tester looking to get more technical […]
My Approach to Testing
Someone asked me, “do I have a method for generating testing ideas?”. My answer; “I follow an exploratory approach to simultaneously learn, generate and execute test ideas”. This might involve exploring the product a little to learn about how it works, this will feed into questions/ideas and then I might explore some other ideas further. […]
Technical Presentations
A few years ago I was lucky enough to win a YOW! diversity scholarship for a day of speaker training with Damian Conway. I’ve never had the opportunity to learn so much about public speaking and giving technical presentations in as condensed timeframe before. These are my hints and tips picked up from that training […]