Blog! Yes, don't mind if I do. #19 on this listing, with relevance statistics relying on long-deleted twitter account. bloggers.feedspot.com/software_tes...

Fake screenshot alert! The message, my opinion, is very real though. All software consultants (with Finnish rate card) should invoice at least 100 euros. Newer needs support and training, on their employees dime. When customers switch contractors, consultants need time to find the next gig.

[Blog] Remembering job interviews visible-quality.blogspot.com/2025/02/reme... Post about my top 8 memories from what I did for interviews for #tester positions. I've got coverage of experiences.

Any asshole can build an org where the smartest, most experienced engineers in the world can get shit done. A truly great engineering org is one where normal, workaday software engineers, with decent skills and ordinary experience, can move fast, ship code, and move the business forward day by day.

To run a demo with an open source test tool today, I needed to start my day with getting the tool fixed with a new release. Who tests the tests rings true.

It's coming up, and I can't wait: #FroGSConf. A week from now, Saturday. I have a hands-on session in mind I want to run on #testing, but I also would like to do one on #QualityEngineering and the practical change to allow quality to be everyone's business. frogsconf.nl - it's free.

Took popular To Do -app, tested it. Created an assessment scoring for it for recruiting purposes. With sample size of a dozen, median 33/98, max 51/98 for newbies. A few seniors already said they'd do this for me to score. If you want that, don't read the whole solution. github.com/exploratory-...

There's appearance of success (local stories of success), without sustainable success over time in #TestAutomation. So I gave them labels and one-liners because this style of thinking helps me structure my ideas.

Comparing the feedback ChatGPT gives based on a screenshot to what a human (other than me) does in an hour. Wake up, one-up time. Tools like this are an external imagination. Use them, but don't rely on them alone.

Don't we all test demo versions of to do app for fun and write about it? visible-quality.blogspot.com/2025/02/that... Turns out we don't need to seed bugs to find bugs. But we need better skills in analyzing functionality.

#Saavutettavuus #Suomi. Käynnissä kaksi merkittävää laajennosta: uusi direktiivi ja uusi tulkinta. Toimenpiteet tiivistettynä: saavutettavuus kuntoon, saavutettavuusseloste kuntoon, ja aktiivinen raportointi puutteista.

Listening to @annemariecharrett.com make the point that "quality engineering is not a testing model but an engineering model". It's a model that integrates quality practices, in a variety people don't always recognize as testing, into engineering.

In preparation for 'Testing strategies for business resilience 2025' today (info.saucelabs.com/business-res...), I am revisiting ideas that drive testing = strategy. I have been collecting and structuring ideas that drive change, in mostly four categories.

I have not managed to make sense of what to write here, what on LinkedIn and what on Mastodon. I am still mostly elsewhere even if I appreciate that here algorithm makes me happy by showing me the tech bubble I belong with.

Auschwitz was at the end of a long process. It did not start from gas chambers. This hatred was gradually developed by humans. From ideas, words, stereotypes & prejudice through legal exclusion, dehumanization & escalating violence... to systematic and industrial murder. Auschwitz took time.

12th time is not the charm but I represent, again, for the 12th time on Finnish Tester of the Year award. There were a few years in between when I refused them adding me as nominee, because it is silly how there are no other women (when there are LOTS). www.tieturi.fi/aanesta-vuod...

I used a phrase of "evidence of testing" and received questions on whether this means test cases, test logs and bug reports. My choice of words was intentional because it does not have to mean test cases, test logs and bug reports. I can imagine other ways of providing evidence.

Yesterday in a room of three senior testers who get regularly corrected they aren’t testers even though they are. We had one thing in common: we hold space for respect of testers with those continuous conversations.

How many test frameworks the world needs? Apparently one more, always. Hovering on a conference on the test automation tools space makes it very evident that a lot of people have built their own test framework. Well, I did too, while reading this book: www.amazon.com/Build-Your-O...

5th and last session on my Test Lead Unite -series of upskilling was today. I expect more conversation and less of intake, but FOMO being too wide audience for people to speak. So I regroup.

Turns out that when testers get to shift left (to time before the project), they don't know that defining bug tracking, test environments and details of processes and metrics aren't relevant conversations. Formulating a teachable approach to this, since I am mentoring it now.

There are two modes of high level test planning, and I am noticing that the default mode is DISTRUST. That leads to assigning efforts and responsibilities on a person called "tester" and creating a separate testing budget. The mode I work for is TRUST. Agree on responsibilities and plan they hold.

Looking at this years trainee program with 3rd day starting and 85 candidates listed, I find myself repeating: talent is equally divided, opportunity is not. There is no good way selecting one #testing trainee out of a list like this and I take comfort in *one at a time, with a steady stream*

New year, new mentoring activities. This spring I have selected from a few buckets. I have one from company organized leadership mentoring program. I have one who works where I work, and one who works at one of our customers, who were brave enough to ask me to mentor,

Discussing ‘smoke testing’ as a term of time of static scheduling of tests, that needs replacing with dynamic scheduling based on changes. There are very few reasons for flagging a set of tests ‘smoke’.

Not liking what got produced is how I do some of my best work. Correcting after AI makes me great. Correcting after people makes me annoying. I can’t quite fit my need of better and good enough to my need of pleasing a few more people.

No matter what the artifact you created is, socializing is where its impact is created. I wrote a piece to analyze a system. Collected data, wrote down conclusions. Did talk about what the conclusions were throughout, and now in the end I am realizing I did not socialize the contents enough.

Test automation is an essential part of development, far too important to leave to testing specialists alone. Join me and a bunch of other cool people for 2 days in November in Amsterdam geeking out on how to do test automation better: automation.eurostarsoftwaretesting.com/call-for-spe...

Funny how the phrases work. When discussing women's experiences, we get a lot of "as a girl dad" to establish authority. Did I miss the memo to argue authority through having equal representation of binary gender in kids I associate with? I did not even imagine my son would quality me.

Making decisions on sponsoring open source tools. Different channels to give them money result in different home for the money. For a conference, I opt to send people to participate over sponsoring, while knowing well that conferences will cease to exist without sponsors.

The amount of energy it takes to select 4 of 273 for #SeleniumConf scholarship (travel+stay+conference) on a personal level is significant. Every single one of the applications is a real person worth being selected. Driving these down to selecting disabled; black; gay; women, that drains me.

In the past for events like ‘Agile Alliance sold to PMI’ I could rely on algorithms to know and search to research. It does not work like that. Discovering blogs is so much harder these days.

When someone you taught comes to an interview and accidentally convinces people in your organization there’s a new way we can do this #testing thing - priceless. One conversation and #EnsembleTesting is requested rather than offered. Long fuse impacts FTW.

Found a few positive affirmations from people from my images. This one serves as a point of action to the future as well. Making people awesome is always, always a worthwhile goal.

My style of looking at world is descriptive. A lot of the feedback I get from my posts is that people confuse it as absolute truth for all projects, in prescriptive frame. Recognizing that everything needs that frame has been helpful and I need to learn to be more comfortable with prescriptive.

[Blog] Socializing Requirements visible-quality.blogspot.com/2025/01/soci...

In 2024 I wrote 62 blog posts, ended up with 200k page views, with now totaling at 1,108,719 page views. So today I wonder if writing less would be a good goal. Quality of connections, over quantity. My blog is at visible-quality.blogspot.fi

Back to work, on a theme of test improvement roadmaps. Working across multiple customers, I am noticing there are a lot of common themes on improvement needed. And not just the "apply AI in testing" one that everyone is talking about. A map of moving things year feels necessary.

Simplifying what it is that I really expect people to do differently when they are #ExploratoryTesting. Delaying commitment on what next, what gets left behind. Telling stories of progress and information. Taking ownership of results.

[Blog] Purposeful and realistic return on investment calculations visible-quality.blogspot.com/2024/12/purp...

Dancing mental circles around how insightful it is that *seniors de-escalate things* whereas escalating is just a cheap trick we teach so that people who can't do more will do the bare minimum.

Seasons greetings "card" sent to a key stakeholder group: managers of all of my #tester colleagues. It took writing a script to be able to do the necessary exploration to get to the list of them. I really wanted to congratulate them for hosting such a worthwhile profession for professional growth.

Needed to figure out in a locally optimized organization who make decisions for our testers. That would have been about 300 minutes of clicking, and it is a thing I have been told we don't know and can't know. Well, spent 300 minutes creating a script that gets me that. The script runs 15 min.

Been trying to speak for pull over push, including on how we bring in our new people. Give them information when they are ready, rather than pushing it down on a schedule. Now I am realizing that pulling is rare and difficult, and unequally divided. Over 6m, 95% of my contacts are initiated by me.

Siloed skills of testing just don't cut it these days. Lead who can't do is a no go. Automator who can't test we seem to have a lot of. Testers not learning automation are dropping out, even the ones good at testing.

🎄✨ #AdvenTesters - Day 17: Maaret Pyhäjärvi Celebrating @maaretp.bsky.social A pillar of the testing world. Prolific sharing of blogs, workshops & social posts, offering thoughtful, practical value. Inspiring with demonstrating building in public & shaping my approach to work. Thank you, Maaret!

Demoing #Playwright to a customer yesterday, I was explaining again how it is not just one thing. That it is slightly different in js/ts and the other languages. Found myself then explaining how it is different in Robot Framework and how it is different in Hercules. Both those too are Playwright.

The conversation of the day: being assigned to test something you’re still learning and maybe will always. Is it reasonable to expect others to tell me what I’m missing by reviewing all my test cases?

New commitments! Today I promised to be an #ExploratoryTesting guardian for a vocational training program for 150 students in Finland next year. Looking forward to Wimma Capstone! wimma-capstone.pages.labranet.jamk.fi/support-mate...

Thinking of a conference I spoke at this week, where I was in minority on not forcing AI generated images on the audience. It does send a message though. I found myself annoyed with the mistyped words on generated and distracted. There is a fundamental disconnect of appreciating these.