Welcome

Welcome To My Blog

First, I’d like to thank you for spending your time here, given the countless resources for learning that are available to us through other mediums. If you have not yet read my main About page, then please do that as well to garner more context on where I am coming from.

While this blog and its contents are my own original work unless otherwise noted, I do not claim to be the resident subject-matter expert on any given topic. My mentality is in a constant state of evolution in regards to my paradigms and heuristics for handling testing. This mentality is forever in a state of constant flux, shepherded by some solidified base pairs that act as guard-rails to assist my movement through the four stages of learning. I do make an intentional effort to gut-check myself, and verify that I am at least at the third stage, conscious competence, before I publish a post. Unconscious competence within testing is my ultimate goal, but the very nature and vastness of testing precludes any possibility of setting a date-stamped milestone in that realm.

Everything I post, must roll-up to supporting this directive:

“The purpose of testing is to cast light on the status of the product and its context, in the service of my [stakeholders].” – James Bach

James uses the term “clients,” but I prefer “stakeholders” hence the bracketed quote modification. As a proponent of context-driven testing principles, it is my intent to spend the majority of the time writing up my own thoughts and ideas on this blog; however, there may be times that I feel it necessary to share a given topic or am otherwise motivated to share the work of others within the community, at which point they will be duly credited to the best of my abilities.

I encourage my readers to leave comments, questions or suggestions on any of my blog posts as it relates to the material. I ask that my readers be more reflective and less reflexive. My own personal heuristic for doing this, is to read a blog at least twice and at least twenty-four hours apart to help formulate my comment. Some postings are more basic, and thus the heuristic is not appropriate in those cases; however, I find that my comments are more cohesive and coherent when I use that method for deeper discussion. All external comments will go into a queue which I will moderate, then within a short time period I will post the original comment along with my reply. I have seen this format work well on other blog and article-driven websites. Since I have the same expectation from the community that I have of myself, I expect to be challenged by you, and other readers. Hopefully this is done in a way that is mature, respectful and facilitates discussion.

Finally, if you had not already figured out by now, I tend to write conversationally, so you may see technical flaws in the grammar, become frustrated with sentence constructs or experience superfluous comma usage where I intend there to be conversational pauses, from time to time. Thank you for tolerating some of my idiosyncrasies during your time spent on my site. It is my highest hope that you find this information valuable, and more importantly, applicable within your own context.

– Connor Roberts


A little something extra…

At the time of writing this I have over twenty partially completed blog posts in my unpublished queue. In the interest of transparency, and to give you an idea of what kind of topics I might be discussing, below is a list of the current working titles. Since this is a blog, and not a book, I currently have no specific preference on the order of topics. If a title catches your eye, make me aware of your interest, and I’ll do my best to bump it up in the cadence.

  • Scheduled for publication by September 1, 2015:
    • Testers Tell A Compelling Story
    • The Improvement Continuum
    • Quality Concepts
  • Scheduled for publication by September 7, 2015:
    • A Tester’s Sprint Framework
    • Heuristic Test Strategy Model (HTSM)
    • A Radio Graph For Testers
  • In-Progress/Unscheduled:
    • CAST 2015: Distilled (bumped up)
    • Ethics in Testing (bumped up)
    • Professional Reputation (bumped up)
    • Balance within Testing (bumped up)
    • Fighting Occam’s Razor
    • Design Acclimation’s Influence On Testing
    • Over Stimulation and Test Degradation
    • Perspective, Bias and Free Will
    • The Tester
    • Product Advocacy in Testing
    • Autonomy, Mastery & Purpose
    • A Case For Cases
    • Conjunctive Test Strategy Design
    • The Ladder of Testing Paradigms
    • The Iterative Learning Requirement
    • Biology And Testing

2 thoughts on “Welcome

  1. Thanh says:

    Hi Connor,

    Great site and your waiting lists are so interesting. I vote for Ethics in Testings topic and Balance within Testing.

    Looking forward to your future blog posts!

    -Thanh

  2. Thanh, you get the ‘First Comment’ award and a gold star. Thank you for your feedback. I have had others interested in the Ethics one as well, and will also bump ‘Balance in Testing’ up. These take time, and a lot of research as well as seeking counsel from more experienced folks than I, in order to create a good and worthwhile blog post. So, while I cannot give any specific date estimates yet I can probably say that both will be completed this year, in 2015. Much appreciated.

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