Saturday 7 November 2009

Carnival of Testers #1

I got this idea from my company's internal blog site - where there's a weekly round-up of interesting internal posts. This is encouraged to be a rotating review - someone different does the round-up each week - a combination of a digest which is filtered by the reviewer's personal preferences...
I expect this to be nick'd - re-used & industrialized by some of the bigger testing forums soon :-)
I'm going to start with forums...

Over on the Yahoo SW testing group there was a question this week: What does the back of a hall of fame tester baseball card look like?
This started out as a silly/playfull question but developed into a more serious and interesting topic considering how (and if) testers can be compared across the industry, how to do it and inherent problems in just comparing testers within one company.

The beginning of October saw the launch of the testing.stackexchange.com site for questions related to testing. I dip in there daily as the site is quite active and worth a look - whether you have a question or an opinion/answer.
Topics discussed this week have ranged from "ET dynamics", tester/dev ratios, cost of bug fixes, Agile/Agile-testers to good books for absolute beginners. Definitely worth a look.

Just over a week ago the STC announced the idea of an e-magazine, asking for contributions for article submission and help with the admin, here. They now have enough volunteers for the admin/help but submission of articles is still open - and it's open to everyone of whatever level of experience!
Questions discussed this week ranged from Test managers who have never tested to Testers as Developers. I recommend everyone to take a look and contribute.

It's been a bit quieter on Test Republic this week - I'm hoping for some reports/posts from the Next Generation SW Testing II conference soon!

For the Swedish testers out there a new forum has just celebrated its first month, TestZonen.se (only in Swedish).

Discussions, blogs and questions seem to follow patterns where software testing is concerned - sometimes it's the sheep/lemin mentality and sometimes the goldfish mentality -but never really boring!

Next time I'll dip into some of the blog posts I've found interesting - hopefully rotating between blogs and forums.

Have you noticed anything interesting on one of the forums recently?

3 comments:

  1. Hey, this is a good idea. I've come across carnivals before (google for 'blog carnivals') and it's a great way to get a bunch of people writing about what is going on.

    The way I've seen it work in the past is that someone coordinates on a weekly/monthly basis who will be writing.

    Am sure there are many ways of doing it and it would be a great way to bring people together in a different kinda way.

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  2. Hi Simon,
    Wicked idea! and an excellent couple of carnivals!

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  3. Hi,
    Glad you enjoyed them. Potential for some crowdsourcing in the future.

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