Things Testing Taught Me

       “So, what’s your testing process like at *insert company name here*?”. We’ve all been asked this question. It comes up all the time when you tell someone that you work in testing and who you work for. People want to know what your cookie cutter process is for testing at your company; either out of genuine curiosity, a search to find a fit for their skills or to find issues in it that they think you could solve by changing “just one thing”.  What happens when the answer is “we don’t have one.”?     Teams and organizations are slowly moving away from the monolithic processes for their development teams and allowing teams to forge their own paths forward. By allowing the teams to set up processes and practices that make sense for the context of not only the project that they work on but also on the context of the experience of their individual team members. This individualized process approach has a lot of benefits for those teams as they get rid of the overhead that slowed them do

Taking a break from the strictly serious and career oriented blog posts here to write something that I think we really all need to be talking about; the challenges and lessons of working remotely during a pandemic.  I want to start this by saying that I know the ability to write about this is coming from a place of significant privilege. I have been fortunate enough to continue working throughout this pandemic, I haven't had the added worries of financial stress added to me nor have I had to worry about a roof over my head. But I think it was put well that, we're all in the same storm but in very different boats . I in no way intend to diminish or ignore the hardships that so many others have endured but I also think that it is important to discuss how this situation has impacted those of us who have been working remotely for the past few months, and possibly for the foreseeable future for many of us.  With that said, I also know that some people are absolutely thriving in this

This past week I was fortunate enough to be able to not only attend, but to speak at Nordic Testing Days 2019. Nordic Testing Days  is a fantastic, and highly attended, conference that takes place every year in Tallinn, Estonia. They bring together speakers, attendees, and sponsors from not only the northern EU but also from around the world to discuss and learn more about testing and tech as a whole. With a bit of background now given, let's dive into what this year was like, from my perspective! Day 1/2 - Exploring Tallinn Heading off to Tallinn, Estonia for Nordic Testing Days (NTD from here on) was my first trip across the Atlantic. Yes, this was my first ever trip to Europe. After a nice 14 hours of travel time, I arrived in Estonia on May 28 around 1:30pm. Sadly, with the time zones and travel I was absolutely too exhausted to be exploring Tallinn that day. I spent most of that day just holed up on the hotel trying to get enough sleep at the right time to be able to pr

Alright so, you've decided you want to try your hand at speaking at a conference. That decision alone is exhilarating... and terrifying. But where do you start? If you don't have a mentor (yet) who has some experience with conference speaking it can be really daunting to think about how to break into the conference speaking circuit, but it isn't as hard as you think (in my experience, with testing conferences)! In this blog post I'll go into details about how (and where) to get started up to the application process, I'll cover actually speaking in a follow up! Shoutout to Shannon Draper for inspiring me to write this after a long winded conversation (in a small town in Colombia) about speaking at conferences Disclaimer: I am not an expert, this is simply my advice based on my experiences! So where do I start? Pick a topic!       The ideal starting place for speaking at a conference, is to have a topic in mind. It's great to want to speak at conferences bu