Stuff to Take In

I have masses of materials; just a fraction is currently linked here. The rest is all where it has been for ages. As we go, I'll bring it here.

Blog / Articles

Here are three recent things to read:

Not Testing but Drowning: Part 1 » Part 2 – Wrangling » Part 3 – Debugging » Part 4 – Action.
How Bart and I ran an improvised keynote at ATD: Keynote eXtreme
Investigating Fuzzy Search, here on this site.

For more, here's this site's collection of articles.

I'll bring over the older articles soon, but for now here's my blog.

I'll update this later with nicer features and a proper list.

Videos

Here's a few – one to give you a feel for my preferred 2-minute style of teaching short, one online hands-on exploration as part of Ministry of Test's Exploration Week, and an on-stage talk, with stuff to play with, from Agile On The Beach 2018.

Workroom Productions - Private Site Access

Private Site Access

I'll build this out with a dedicated page and featured videos. I'm making many more videos to support my online workshops.

Papers

It's been a while since a wrote a paper. Here, though, are a few which caught people's attention.

You can still find my collection of papers on the old site. I'm working to keep the links to these pdfs the same, as they've been cited in others' work.

These are long papers, and .pdfs, so not particularly engaging to casual readers. I'll build this out with a dedicated page and featured papers. I may revist these papers in short chunks, writing about how my ideas have changed since writing them.

Outlines and Abstracts

Every talk starts with an idea. To get an audience for that idea, you need something to take to a conference organiser. I've done big talks and tiny talks, long-form hands-on tutorials and events. I review papers for EuroSTAR, ATD, MoT (and so can you). I even run workshops on how to do talks and write outlines and abstracts. I'll post the stuff I send to conferences here; some old, some new. You'll see how I work, and I'll get – perhaps – a sense of what works for who.

For now, here's a short page of talk outlines.

Below this point, you'll see my experiments with ghost templates and lists.

Articles

Here are some recent articles. For a more complete list, go to the full list of articles.

Current LLM tech stack	Stuff I use to generate stuff
Learning with an LLM	An LLM is a powerful, flawed and delightful study tool.
Taming 2000 Safari Tabs	whipping up a tiny tool, and the joy of burndown
Guiding Hands-off AI using Hands-on TDD	All sorts of stuff around our upcoming workshop at Agile Testing Days.
How I'm writing	Enabling experiences, exploration and change, rather than publication or narrative.
Handholds Framework	A Mnemonic Heuristic! After so many years!
Building a Bart	Building an avatar generator, as a tester.
New Year Wishes	I've been using StableDifusion to make New Year's cards. I used StableDiffusionWeb, which is currently free and requires no login. If you want to make some of your own, you should. You'll need a 'prompt'; a text description to guide the way
Publishing a Directory with Flask	How to serve python coverage metrics as an html page within replit.com
Working with Answers to Open Questions	Complicated answers are harder to work with. Here's how I cope.
Question Chaining	How I chain questions together, building, refining and sometimes wrecking) a model
Question Transformation 2 - Refocus	Refocus your Questions to match your purpose
Writing Tools	My handwrting and paper filing system gets worse, and most of what I write beyond jotting now goes via a keyboard. An MX Keys [https://www.logitech.com/en-gb/products/keyboards/mx-keys-wireless-keyboard.html] , generally. Here's my current set of tools, and their purposes: OmmWriter [https://ommwriter.com] – for
April stuff at Workroom Productions	Stuff on exploratory testing, new exercises, offers, peer conferences, and more
Exploration without Tools is Weak and Slow	An overdue rant: The days of hand-cranked exploration are done.
Teaching Exploratory Testing with Code	Concentrate on data rather than tooling and syntax
LEWT: The London Exploratory Workshop in Testing	Rules of LEWT
Acid Test	Peer conference. Not safe. Exciting though, and full of lessons.
Making the RasterReveal Exercise	Building an exercise involves much wrangling and working around unexpected behaviours.
Teeny Tiny Test Harness	console.assert is my go-to teeny tiny test harness for JavaScript

Videos

For a more-detailed list, go to the videos page

MoT Exploratory Testing Week 2021	I use Python to find surprises (for me) in the Python interpreter.
Wicked Problems	Testing contains several "Wicked" problems, whose resolutions are unclear until they are found.

Outlines and Abstracts

For a more-detailed list, go to the outlines page

Hands-on, Tooled-up Testing	A full day workshop on exploring systems with data
Keynote eXtreme	A keynote with a random title. And nobody – including the speaker – knows who speaker will be.
Questions, Questions	This interactive workshop will help you ask the right testing questions, of the right people, at the right time.
Teaching Exploratory Testing with Code	Concentrate on data rather than tooling and syntax
Wrangling, Debugging and Testing	Do we spend months getting our systems to a point where we can test? We do. Here's why, and what we can do about it.
Wrangling, Debugging and Testing (conference talk abstract)	It would be good to recognise that many testers spend most of their time not testing (in the sense of finding new useful info), but making their SUTs work at all.

Papers

For a more-detailed list, go to the papers page

Exploratory Testing Notes

Very rough notes from me as a younger consultant

Exercises

To see collections of exercises, go to the exercises page

Dealing with Disaster	Thinking through what can go wrong, and practicing one's attitude and response.
Exercise: Becoming Coverage	A game to play with colleagues to understand coverage more deeply.
Exercise: Other People's Code	Consider your own code through the lens of other people's code.
Getting to a Great Abstract	Take your idea to a better place
Raster Reveal	Reveal pictures to see what is in them, as an exercise in exploration.