Carnival of Testers #4

What a period the last three weeks have been in the testers blogosphere. Really interesting with a few noticeable themes - conference-related and "honesty" were the two biggest themes that I noticed this time around.

Below is a taster - and I'm trying not to burden the same people with traffic to their blogs the whole time ;-) As usual you can volunteer any post worthy of a shout in the comments for the period (25-Nov - 14-Dec09).

There were a bunch of post relating to EuroStar2009. You can check out the twittering with the #esconfs hashtag.

• It was whilst looking at these hashtags I noticed one of several posts that Nathalie (@FunTESTic) made.
• Shrini Kulkarni (@shrinik) gave a nice roundup of the conference.
• Michael Bolton (@michaelbolton) wrote about the test lab set-up. He also put up the slide show of his "burning issues" talk on his site. Well worth a look.
• Rikard Edgren gave a full smörgåsbord of flavours (or maybe it should be julbord for this time of year) from the event, here.

Exploratory Testing popped in a few guises in this round - two different slants were:

• Ray Claridge writes about Agile and now brought ET into the equation, here.
• Eric Jacobson provided his first experience of teaching ET and session based testing.

 Other posts covering a range of topics were:

• Albert Gareev was working through testing and checking questions in a questionin piece.
• Amit Kulkarni (@mumbaitesting) reflected on a "popular" question about testing something completely, here.
• Gojko Adzic (@gojkoadzic) made a nice film analogy about the dangers of releasing early.
• As someone wanting to do my own Pecha Kucha I was interested to read Markus Gärtner's (@mgaertne) post. Nice pics!
• utest (@utest) did an interview with Matt Heusser, part 2 is here.
• For those wondering if you're an unconsciously incompetent tester check out Anne-Marie Charrett's post here.
• Lists, lists, lists... Jay Phillips (@jayphilips) gave a list covering 100+ software testing blogs, here. You can check if your own is there!
• Elisabeth Hendrikson (@testobsessed) gave a reminder about keeping the deliverables of Agile in focus.
• Catherine Powell was insightful and to the point with a couple of posts on randomness and being thick skinned.
• Justin Hunter (@Hexawise) gave an example of a "subtle" defect that is has been seen by many without being corrected. Could you see it before it was pointed out? (Warning: it's to do with English grammar!)
• Naomi Karten (@NaomiKarten) gave a cautionary tale about managing expectations - although I think of it more as understanding expectations. Take a look, here.
• Trish Khoo gave some advice on delivering bad news - for testers and wanabee testers. 
• Lanette Creamer (@lanettecream) wrote a bunch of thoughtful articles, but this thought-provoking one stood out.
• There was a Gordon Ramsay theme to a couple of Rob Lambert's (@Rob_Lambert) posts! Firstly in a nice analogy about ingredients for a tester, here, and then another when I was expecting the expletives to fly here - although it ended up as perseverance applause ! Tongue-in-cheek but with a serious background on "fairness".
• This leads onto some other calls recently for niceness, honesty and fairness by a various people: Lisa Crispin (@lisacrispin), wrote a piece encouraging people to treat each other with respect and Matt Heusser (@mheusser) highlighted some "copied" work and rounds off the carnival with a piece on virtue.

Hope you find some interesting posts in the above - I lost count of the number of posts I read but had good fun doing so. More after the holidays...

Any gems that slipped under my radar?