The promise
On January 3, 2011 Phil Kirkham posted a question on the Software testing club:
“so if you were to set a target of doing 2 hours practice a week every week this year, how would you spend your 100 hours ?”
Having missed the post initially I read the post as early as the week before Christmas. So I really had not enough time left to get to 100 hours in 2011. After reading the post and comments I felt however that Phil was making a valid point. One should spent time and effort on practicing and in my comment on his post I made the following promise:
“As 2012 is on the brink of starting I will try to put this into practice. As two hours seems a bit low I will spent 5 hours per week on practicing and some extra time on logging and writing short (monthly) posts about it.”
2012
So today is January 1st and I am starting to live up to my promise. Every week of this year, except for the summer holidays, I will try to practice for at least 5 hours and log the things I do. At the end of every month I will write a post sharing my activities, providing short reviews and formulate my insights.
I have started practicing earlier today by reading “Essential Software Test Design” by Torbjörn Ryber. A book that I had downloaded as a PDF before and of which I found after a number of pages and comments from fellow DEWT’s that I wanted to have the hard copy. Later today I will make time to listen to TWiST # 76. I am not yet sure what I will do for the rest of the month, but as said before I will keep you posted.
For now I wish all of you a wonderful, succesful and entertaining 2012 and I hope to meet lots of you in person this year!
Arborosa 
Flattering that the thread I started has got your attention and that you’ve made plans to put it into practice. I’ll be following along to see how it goes – good luck !
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To spark some discussion – where is testing practice different to testing during working hours? When thinking about how to test your applications at work, isn’t that practice as well? Or, to phrase it differently, if you’re not thinking about how you’re testing your work applications, why not, has a bit of routine set in that can be broken?
Some new thoughts can only be gained through others, i.e. reading books, articles, etc. However IMO many new insights can be gained by questioning established routines and applying working practices from other areas.
Let me know how you get on 🙂
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Hi Thomas,
Thanks for your comment. I agree that by practicing testing at work you can use and sharpen your critical thinking skills also. But I have noticed that a change of scenery and the input of different views can shift a otherwise fixed viewpoint and bring new insights in how to approach a testing problem. Additionally you can learn new skills from what others have experienced or modeled and apply them to your own context. And I think its easier to do that away from work where there is no other pressure or distraction.
So far I am on track and have spent 3 hours on reading blogs, watching a video, and writing down ideas that I want to ‘test’ at work. At this rate I will have lots of stuff to share in the blog at the end of the month so stay tuned.
Cheers,
Jean-Paul
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