Thank you for EuroStar 2014

Last week I went to EuroStar conference in Dublin, and it was a blast!

Dublin Conference Center

I have to say that this was totally unexpected to me. I tried to win a ticket at the greentester contest, but didn't make it, and even that I have a budget for trainings and conferences, EuroStar was just too much for me.

But then, one month ago, Rosie Sherry emailed me asking if I would go to Dublin if she managed to get me a ticket, and my answer was "Yes, sure!".

So, the conference has been grand!, I attended to great talks, knew a lot of people and had a lot of fun.

But first things first, I have to say Thank you...

Thank you Rosie Sherry for getting me a ticket to the conference, I had a great time in Dublin and it happened to be a great experience.

Thank you Morten Hougaard, who came up with a ticket for the gala dinner, so I could join the crowd in this event.

Thank you Michael Larsen, for sitting down with me, letting me complete a challenge and providing a Miagi-Do brown belt which I will wear with honour.

Thank you to Emma, Guna, Ru and the rest of the Test Lab folks for making the lab the best place to be in the conference. Perfect to practice stuff and complete challenges. Hugo and I were able to solve the black box, and the feeling of satisfaction was worth the struggle.

Thank you to the people behind the EuroStar conference, I saw you all working very hard so the conference would be a success, and because it was, you deserve every nice word about how it went.

Thank you to my team at peerTransfer, for testing all issues that came to my kanban slot while I was at the conference, so when I got back to the office I didn't have a mountain of issues waiting to get tested.

You people rock! and I am grateful to all of you for this experiences I had.

And last but not least, thank you Empar, my beloved wife, for rowing my same boat, in the same direction, for running our family while I'm miles away,

My plan for the EuroStar Conference.

There is a quote I like from George S. Patton: "A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week."

Next week I expect to be at EuroStar conference in Dublin, so I need a plan, and better if it is now!

I have checked Rob Lambert's Unnofficial Guide for attending EuroStar.

I made my Checklist:
Business Cards.
Camera && Charger.
Notebook && Pencils.
Map of budget car parking location && Plane ticket.
Laptop && Charger.
Phone && USB cable.
Electric plug adaptor, as Ireland has the same plugs that British do.
... and the rest of the stuff you take when you go 2 nights on travel.

I also have a plan for those talks that seems interesting to me:

It's not a perfect plan, and it won't happen like that for sure,  some things are going to change, but that's okay, after all, as Helmuth von Moltke the Elder once said: "No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force."

It's not just a watch.

In November I went to Brighton for a one day mobile testing training. This subject is getting interesting to follow, not because it's the future, but because it's the present, just that many choose to live in the past.

One of the things we talked about was the future of mobile devices, and here it seems that we will face three tendencies.
New phones, with new features, screen resolutions, sensors, operation systems and so on..
RFID sensors everywhere, at supermarkets, trains, stores, cars...
Wereable devices, and here comes my story...

Two months ago I needed to change my watch. My old Casio broke its glass and water was making the way to the inside case, getting it difficult to read, so after searching a bit around, I decided to get a Garmin VivoFit.

And, just for trying it out nicely, I got a spare one for my wife, so we both started experimenting with this wereable device.

The gadget is basically a pedometer that you wear in your wrist and also gives you the time of the day, so I didn’t have to get a new watch. But it does some other things too.

It has a little red bar, that comes out when I been sitting down for more than 1 hour, warning me that I should start thinking about getting myself back on the move.
It also keeps track of how many steps I been taking, and every day he suggest a goal, based on my previous days, so I know how many steps I am missing for the day.

These features can be useless if you decide to ignore them, but if you don’t, they keep you walking to the office and not taking the elevator when you get back home.


...And when you set up your age and weight, it can calculate the calories you are burning as you go, so you have a measure about how you are doing today. Here is where the fun starts.

To put it simple, let’s say that our body needs calories to burn in order to perform any activity, so, it burns calories when we walk, when we run, but it stops burning calories when we sit down for a while.

Available calories can be refilled into our body by eating and drinking, but some food has more calories than others, so water has none, fruit has a few, cookies and soda have a lot of them. If you eat too much and exercise too little, you body has to keep these calories somewhere, as I noticed last summer when I had to get a new pair of jeans with a larger waist size.

So the point here is to keep track of how much you are burning and refilling, just to know where you stand.

Still this gadget doesn’t measure it all, because it’s a simple pedometer, it can not detect when you are cycling, or swimming… for these I use Endomondo so whenever I choose to ride the bike I can still keep track on how much sugar I might be burning.

This is cool to keep track of the burnt calories, so what about the ones I am eating?

For that we found MyFitnessPal, a nice collaborative app where you can keep track of what you are eating and how many calories that is supposed to contain.

And the great thing here is that these 3 apps can sync together. At the end of the day, I can get a estimated balance about how I am doing.

Off course, all this is based on guesstimations, but it’s okay as long you are aware, I just want to know if I been walking too little, or eating too much, I don't need too much precision on this.

Some people have healthy habits, they understood time ago, that if they wanted to keep fit, they needed to watch out what they were eating, and they also needed to do some exercise, I think this gadget can be pretty useless for them.

But for us, my wife and me, it quite helps having a little control of how we are doing, and once we got some numbers, we started walking a bit more and eating a bit less.

This is the start of our journey into the wereables, two devices and three apps that communicates with each other, storing information in the cloud and providing information to users across many platforms, and this is just the beginning, just wait and see.

Mobile Testing with Stephen Janaway

This November I went back to Brighton.

Rosie Sherry and The Ministry of Testing have come up with two weeks of awesome training events, but given my limited budget, I had to choose one day to attend, so this time I went for the Mobile Testing day.

The trip went just fine, as I bought my tickets early, I could have a cheap flight from our sunny small town airport in Valencia...

...to the big and rainy one in Gatwick.

Once in Brighton, this training thing had two different events, One was attending the training day, and the other was hanging out with testers.

Mobile Testing with Stephen Janaway.

For this training session we sat down in groups in big round tables, so we had plenty of space to talk and to take notes. Stephen had some slides supporting his talk, and there were whiteboards so we could draw things at the exercise times.

We talked among others about:
What mobile was about, and why we should test on mobile.
What mobile testing was about.
What submitting to app stores was like.
How to approach to Mobile Testing automation.
Why you should test on the train instead of the office.

We did some work about:
Drawing a mindmap about how we would test a app that would take pictures.
Ponting out differences on the same app while running on different OS.
Testing real life apps looking for real life bugs.

At the end, testing is still testing, so when it's about a feature, all learnings and knowledge a functional tester has are valid.
But because it is hosted on this mobile device, the context changes and impacts a lot, this requires to focus on it, understand how it impacts and spend time testing it.

It's not just a device with a smaller screen.

If you are interested in mobile testing, I can recommend you this video and this book, as well as joining Stephen in his next training session wherever that might be.

Hanging out with Testers.

Because these training days are happening in a row, it happens that if you reserve some spare time, you can hang out with the testers that came for the previous day session, and with those who are to join the next one, so I had the chance to meet a nice bunch of testers.

I had a great time in Brighton,  and I'm really looking forward for Testbash2015

Getting Tomislav to CoCo2015

The Copenhagen Context conference is getting ready for it´s next years session, you can check their site here: http://copenhagencontext.com/

One of the things they come out with is the chance to get a free seat on the conference. The rules are quite simple, record and upload a video somehow related with this years theme: "Let’s take context-driven testing even further."

My approach to get Context Driven Testing further, is to get more Context Driven Testers in town. Since the only other Context Driven dude I know in town is my friend +Tirtharaja Dasa I recorded this video:

The funny part is that he didn´t know that I was going to ask for a place for him, until the camera was recording, but hey, we are testers, we have to try.

*This video got selected, so Tomislav is making it to the conference.
Thank you all for your support!

The Schneider Trophy.

Let me introduce you to Jacques Schneider.

Back in 1911 he thought that seaplanes had a great future since so much of the earth is covered by water, so this successful French financier decided to create a competition, a race between seaplanes where the rules were quite simple:
- A Triangular course was set over the sea, and the fastest seaplane that would complete the course would win the trophy.
- After some years running the competition, they came out with a second rule, the winning seaplane had to remain moored to a buoy for six hours, without human intervention.

Once these rules were set, many design companies from around the world would create a seaplane that would race trying to get the Trophy.
The race happened eleven times between 1913 and 1931, and the trophy itself is nowadays exhibited in the London Science Museum.

On the first race, the winning plane was a French Deperdussin, that managed to complete the race with an average speed of 73 km/h.

But once the competition was set, every year, new designs from France, Italy, Great Britain and the United States would try to get a faster plane, with better aerodynamics and more powerful engines.

In 1931, The last year the competition was hold, the Brits won with a Supermarine 6B, She completed the race with an average speed of 547 km/h.

After 18 years of continuous iterations, where every prototype was faster than the last one, where engineers would learn what happened when they tried out new wing design, new engines, fuel injection, aerodynamics, wind tunnels, tools to build and test the planes... they managed to double the speed three times!

And this was because the rules were so simple, it was about to create the fastest seaplane.

There were no more rules, nothing about how to draw, design, build and test the plane, it just had to be a seaplane, she had to float, she had to fly...

And that was it.

The Schneider Trophy might just be a Cup. But British designers learned a lot, and when they designed the Supermarine Spitfire, they had all these learnings in mind.

These were the good' ol days, but we need to have in mind, that our present days were the future for these men. And that the future we are building for tomorrow depends on the decisions we take today.

Nowadays everything comes with software, we have replaced the Steam that powered all industrial revolution with software that does things, everywhere. And this software was to be designed, developed, and somehow tested.

I am a Software Tester, and that´s what I do, I test the software my development team produces, I help them delivering the best quality in whatever we produce.

And if this wasn´t complex enough, there is a new ISO 29119 coming out with a set of rules about how my testing should be.

From what I have seen until today, and getting back to my story, they are trying to tell me how the seaplane should be designed, how it should be built, and how it should be tested, they are asking me to build a biplane, just because at some point, all planes were biplanes and that was how planes should be.

They are suggesting me how to plan, how to document and how my process should be, and I don´t want that. In the last 20 years, Agile Development and Context Driven Testing are changing how software is being developed and tested, and this ISO is for no use in these contexts, moving us back to the waterfall days, where every discovery should be planned in advance.

As a Professional Tester, I don´t agree with such a rule, I don´t want to be forced in the future to follow such guidelines, I want to be able to experiment, to learn, to defy whatever preconceived rule might come in our way to produce the best software we can do.

I want to understand where the problems are, and how to get them fixed, I don´t want to work with a set of solutions that a board of consultants and academic teachers defined as all I needed to know, No thanks.

If you are a Developer, I'm pretty sure you don´t want it either. And if you are not a Tester nor a Developer, the bad news is that it affects you too, because you will be the final user of whatever we manage to deliver.

There is a nice page to follow the debate about the ISO at the Ministry of Testing.
And if you feel like, you can sign the petition to Stop 21991 as I have done.

Thank you.

Short list of books to read, if you want to know about software testing.

My short list about books related to Software Testing:

 

• How to Break Software (Amazon). In this book James Whittaker go into the basic actions of software testing and boundary analisis. Once you get the idea about how you should test one single field, you might like to read...
• Explore it! (Pragmatic). Where Elisabeth Hendrickson will explain how you can explore your software, be it a desktop application, a web or a API. Once you know how to explore and test, you might want to understand why this is important, so...
• Perfect Software and other illusions about Testing (Amazon) By Jerry Weinberg can help you understand the relationship of testers, developers and the rest of the world.
• And the closest book to a Bible we have in Software Testing: Lessons learned in software testing.

And there is more...

• If you want to go Agile: Agile Testing and More Agile Testing will help you understand the Agile Context.
• If you want to grow big: How to reduce cost of software testing.
• If you want to grow nice: Beautiful Testing.
• If you want to have fun while testing: Cartoon Tester.

I am missing some others, but otherwise this would not be a short list.