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Showing posts with the label learning

Does the language we speak shape the way we think?

This week I have been looking a bit into whether language(s) we speak, shape the way we think? Being raised up bi-lingual from the age of 8, where I spoke mostly Bosnian and Norwegian with a good addition of English, this is quite an interesting topic for me personally. Inspired by a talk from Lera Boroditsky from TEDWomen 2017, who had done a lot of experiments on this, here is what I found out. If you find this interesting, I encourage you to take a look at the presentation, many examples that I mention here are taken from her talk. 7000 languages, different way of thinking? There are about 7000 languages, each different from one another, in many ways, different sounds, different vocabularies, not at least different structures, to mention a few differences. Whether a language affect how we think has been debated throughout the centuries. "To have a second language is to have a second soul", stated Charlemagne, which is quite a bold statement suggesting that language is ...

Shifting left, shifting right - where to shift next? - part 2

2010 - a full year in, "if testers are not involved early, we do not want to be involved later" After being employed full-time for a year or so, we finally completed a full circle of releases, both the major releases involving a full scaled up beta/pilot program, and some minor releases, as this was taking place on a yearly basis. After each ended project, a small group of people from different teams formed a retrospective team, to go over what was done good and what could be done better next time, for all projects individually but also as a whole. This was before any agile methodologies were introduced. During the retrospective, or post-mortem analysis I think it was called at the time, we from the test team argued that we were not involved early enough and that we ended testing specifications that were well out of date due to our late involvement. This was taken into consideration and that from next phase we were to be included in all start up meetings, and walkthroughs...

Shifting left, shifting right - where to shift next? - part 1

Today it is almost unthinkable, with the teams that I work with every day (read - in my context), that some team members inside a software delivery team are not involved in almost every phase of the software development life cycle. Looking back some years ago it was certainly not like that, specially for testers. In this, and the coming posts I will share some of my experiences and thoughts on this subject as well as what I believe where we should shift in the future;  left, right, or even more left, and right... 2007 - The first experiences, part-time tester, waterfall I started to work with software testing in 2007, as many of us in the field, by chance as a part time tester. At this point the company that I worked for did not have any full time dedicated testers, only a team of part time testers who rotated, and worked at least 2 days a week. The team consisted of students studying economics or computer science at master level, who could work at any time of the day/night, ...

How do I stay "up to date" on software testing related stuff?

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"Up to date" can probably be debated as development in our field change quite fast, and what was ground braking yesterday, fast becomes old news today. I try to read as much as possible, and this usually vary from week to week, day to day due to other obligations, but I squeeze in some hours each week. This is mostly done on the evening, on the way to and back from work, and at work when I have 5-10 minutes until a meeting starts, and I can not start on anything new, I spend that time picking up a blog post or two, and traversing through it. There is a set of blogs I follow, these are mostly from other practitioners in the field software testing / development. All of them are organized in different folders in Feedly , which I use to aggregate the blog posts, news, and other information. Here is a screenshot of the structure that I have. Testing folder contain most feeds from about 50-ish sources, and I have separated some of the blogs into AutTesting (Automated Test...