In a bid to improve my technique, and get into the habit of drawing every day, I challenged myself to 100 days of sketching. As a natural doodler I also love to draw given free time. Covid has certainly provided plenty of that. …

Meaningful Memories — volunteering on vacation Inland from the town we were staying in, a motorbike ride on a bumpy, unfinished gravel road away, we pulled up to the Animal Protection Society (APS) in Samoa. …

“Life’s short” is a hard message to ignore from one of your best friends who is terminally ill with cancer at 44. She also reminded me my hard-working mum had died before reaching retirement, as if I had forgotten. Catie was trying to push the message home. I’d been frustrated…

I used to think Test artefacts like Test Plans, Approaches and Summary Reports were for the client’s benefit. Written because the client had requested it. Merely a formality. I was not surprised to discover most of these documents were never even read. Not wanting to create useless documents for the…

Over the years I have delivered projects using both Waterfall and Agile methodologies, although usually it has been a hybrid of both. In my early days Waterfall projects were all the rage. The dev team were delivering on phases 4 and 5 of a programme of work that was conceptualised…

I am a big fan of Random Acts of Kindness, and I have come to believe there are infinite opportunities to perform acts of kindness, random or not. Coming up with the ideas is often both the hardest part and the most satisfying part. Once you have thought of an…

When I was little, I remember my Mum posting a huge wad of Christmas cards. My family did not seem to know that many people, so I wondered who were all these cards being sent to? My folks had emigrated from England, to New Zealand before I was born. These…

I am a manual software tester. I will have a go at test automation, but it is out of my comfort zone. So, when my manager wanted my Test Team to become more “T Shaped”, I was anxious. I did not feel I was overly technical, and the idea of…

When I first started testing, I was stoked when I found a bug. It was reassuring I was doing my job right. But by the time I became a Test Lead I had a significant amount of experience in finding bugs and realised it was only the really quirky bugs…