The Testing Show

On today's show, Matt Heusser and Michael Larsen welcome Johanna Rothman, long time management author and coach to talk about the changing roles in management, the ways in which traditional management culture is not well suited for the Information Age, and ways in which thinking about managing oneself and managing others can be improved for the realities of today's workplace, specifically in the area of software testing and testing management.

For many software testers, it can be challenging to build up a portfolio of work that can demonstrate skill, knowledge, and expertise. Having GitHub account for coding skills is one approach but many testers work on proprietary systems where people outside their company cannot see what you are capable of. Open source projects are a way to get involved in an externally visible way but where does a tester start and what can they actually do? Dr. Jessica Ingrassellino from InfluxData joins us Matthew Heusser and Michael Larsen to talk about her initiative to make open source projects more available to testers and testing and ways that testers can get involved and why they would want to in the first place.

Many of us are familiar with the idea of negative testing, where we feed bad data or inputs to a program or application to see how it behaves. That works for a program or an app but how about an entire infrastructure? A discipline that has come to be known as Chaos Engineering is where this level of "testing" comes into play. Intriguing but what is "Chaos Engineering?" Claire Moss joins Matt Heusser and Michael Larsen to discuss the good, bad, ugly, and just plain odd aspects of a discipline that is not readily understood but bears a resemblance to Exploratory Testing. It is also available to any organization that wants to implement it, provided they are ready and willing to go down a rabbit hole or ten.

Now more than ever, the idea of working for one company and doing one job for our working life is an outdated notion. For many of us, curating and developing a career is a job unto itself, especially in today's ever-changing job and career landscape. Raj Subrameyer comes back to discuss his new book "Skyrocketing Your Career" and we all talk about our personal journeys and how we have arrived where we are and hope to go next.

In this day and age, everything is becoming code. It used to be just the applications but with the proliferation of software to create software (think of Jenkins pipelines) or the aspects to Terraforming servers in the cloud (and Terraform being just one way to do it), there is ever more code being written to set up and deploy software. Who tests all that, and how does one get to play in these extensive sandboxes? Perze Ababa and Gwen Iarussi join Matthew Heusser and Michael Larsen to talk about these areas of recent and new development, the skills needed to be successful, and ways to make sure that you get to be in "The Room Where it Happens", to borrow from Hamilton.

Software fills many niches and does many things for individuals and businesses. Some software is designed and developed for mass user interaction, while other applications are designed for specific purposes and markets. Some software is literally developed to work within a company for the benefit of its staff and is never seen outside of the company it serves. Still, it feels as though the testing advice that is given and received often focuses on big players and customer facing software. Perze Ababa, early show alumni, joins Matt Heusser and Michael Larsen to discuss his role in software initiatives that reach both to customers and those projects that are specific to organizations and their workers to be productive and effective. He explains how one size definitely does not fit all.

The title this week may seem odd but it is indeed correct, as Michael Larsen participated in and in effect helped to test out the various challenges and solutions that go with putting on a virtual conference in this current period of time. In this episode, Michael talks with two long time veterans of the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference, Philip Lew (Program Chair) and Bill Opsal (a long time volunteer and troubleshooter) about the ups and downs of putting on a virtual conference, things that went well, challenges faced and some lessons learned that may help anyone with putting on a virtual conference in the future.

As organizations get larger or infrastructure/software becomes more relied upon, testing itself can have its share of risks. For this episode, Matt and Michael chat with Simon Evans about how to approach larger systems (and perhaps not so large systems), make the needed decisions to focus on important areas and make QA a less risky proposition altogether.

It's safe to say that 2020 has introduced challenges into people's lives in unprecedented ways (at least in our current times). Some are thriving but many are feeling the results of burnout. Raj Subrameyer joins Matthew Heusser and Michael Larsen to talk through common issues of burnout as it relates to tech workers and some approaches and methods that can be used to deal with said burnout if not banish it entirely.

There have been record and playback tools available for the past few decades, with varying results and reputations. They often over promise and under deliver. Today, Matthew Heusser and Michael Larsen are joined by Rex Feizi of Subject7 and Leandro Melendez (Señor Performo) to talk about the latest generation of record and playback tools, how to leverage them effectively and use them in spaces where they are intended (as well as explore other areas where they can be beneficial) and get some good advice about how to make the best use of these tools both now and into the future.