🕵️‍♀️ Quality Coach newsletter #35

📘 The Quality Coach's Handbook

Exciting news: I'm now in the editing phase of the quality coach book! This is the working copy of the cover page.

This means you can purchase my long-awaited book in a couple of months! Get a sneak peek of the content by checking out the draft table of contents. Or sign up to be notified when it's available.

Book Discount for loyal readers

I wanted to create this premium post because it is an essential workshop quality coaches can conduct with their teams. It may get quiet around here as I wrangle the book together. In return for your patience, all premium subscribers who are current at the time of publishing will receive a special coupon offering a 🙏 discount.

It's one small way to thank you for being a loyal reader over the last four years.

I may publish random posts as I polish up the book. For example, I realised that the following post on Exploratory Testing in Teams had been sitting in draft for six months and deserved to be included in the book.

🕵️‍♀️ Exploratory Testing with a Team

I wanted to put this premium post together as I felt this is an essential workshop quality coaches can do with their teams.

Exploratory testing is an unfamiliar term outside of the software testing community, and many software engineering teams don't know the benefits of performing testing in this way.

Whenever I've performed this with teams, the response has been enthusiastic. So why not give it a try?

Exploratory Testing with a Team

Holding an exploratory testing session is a fun way to encourage teams to think from a customer perspective.

Anne-Marie CharrettAnne-Marie Charrett

📚 From the Archives

Can you believe I’ve been writing about software testing for almost twenty years? Here’s some previous content on exploratory testing

How to avoid being fooled in software testing

As software testers, our role is to avoid being fooled by stuff that is potentially fooling others. We try to avoid being fooled by the product

Anne-Marie CharrettAnne-Marie Charrett

Courage in Exploratory Testing

Exploratory Testing doesn’t have ‘dutch courage’ to rely on. It requires us to have conversations about our information in potentially hostile environments. Sometimes we can feel like the lone fish swimming against the tide of the silent majority.

Anne-Marie CharrettAnne-Marie Charrett

Beware the Lotus Eaters

I realised how limiting my approach to testing was in this scenario. When faced with a problem beyond my immediate capability, instead of figuring out how to fix the problem, I narrowed my model.

Anne-Marie CharrettAnne-Marie Charrett

Check out more under the tag exploratory-testing or for more diverse content software-testing

🏘️ Picks from the Community

The training by James Lyndsay is on my bucket list and should be on yours, too. This one is on exploring interfaces.

Exercise: Changing Input Mechanisms

Play with one field and several input mechanisms.

Workroom ProductionsJames Lyndsay

I finally got around to reading this post by Beth Andres-Beck.

Forest & Desert

This guest post is written by Beth Andres-Beck, following discussions we had preparing for our recent Øredev pair keynote (link to come).

Software Design: Tidy First?Kent Beck

Some great points from Kat Obring.

From Gatekeeper to Guide: Why Emotions Matter in Quality Engineering – Kato Coaching

Kato CoachingModern Testing in Agile and DevOps teams.kato-admin

So good to see Ale blogging again!

Same Tools, Different Uses: Adapting Leadership to New Contexts

As leaders, our toolkits are packed with experiences, strategies, and practices that have worked wonders in the past. But when we step into new environments, those familiar tools often require a di…

Road Less TestedAlessandra Moreira

Some salient points from Lisa Crispin.

Testing, terminology and misperceptions - Holistic Testing with Lisa Crispin

Terminology adds to misperceptions of testing, testers and contributes to lack of understanding of the value of quality, whole team approach

Holistic Testing with Lisa CrispinLisa Crispin

Happy reading!

Anne-Marie