What you really need to know to become a Testing Expert

Hello Everybody. Today I would like to show you what you need to become a Testing expert. If you had noticed I deliberately left out the word Software. Why? Because becoming and expert in Testing Anything has the same root as becoming an expert to test software. And for that let me take you back to a Galaxy Far Far Away in Time AND Space. The beginnings. I went to school in Oroszlany, my home town in Hungary. My official Technical title would be Mechanical Testing Engineer. I had the luck that most things which were thought at that school and I liked were thought by people I liked too and were clever in their respective fields. Like Pneumatics, Metallurgy, Mechanics, Chemistry these were all really awesome fields. To this day I don’t know why I haven’t ended up in some lab testing the breaking point of metals and the capacity of various chemicals. ...

January 21, 2013 · 3 min · hannibal

From Chaos There Shall Be Order

Dear Readers. Today I want to talk to you about something I discovered over years of working and experience. Also something that I can see in the world repeating over and over again. Not just in Software business but also in History in Human nature in Physics and Systems. So let’s see what I’m talking about. What is Chaos? Chaos is a state of utter confusion. Chaos is the opposite of order. Chaos is when everybody does what they want without thinking about the consequences. ...

January 4, 2013 · 4 min · hannibal

Methodologies, Thought Patterns, Lies

Hello everybody. Today I’d like to write about something I discovered over the years of researching and following certain people and movements in Testing and Programming world. Let me tell you that there are quite an amazing amount of stuff to be read out there. It’s overwhelming. Let’s talk about Methodologies first. There are many out there currently. In programming and in testing too. Many speak of ways how you should or should not do you work. Many of them tend to say that others aren’t the right way. However just as many tend to say that you can share your knowledge or you can only partially use that particular methodology because they realised that if they say others are crap they close themselves from evolving and they create a way of thinking that will say: Ohhh yeah? You can’t tell me what I should do! Who are you to say that that technique is wrong? ...

December 12, 2012 · 5 min · hannibal

TEAS: Testing Exploration Adventure Session

Hello Everybody. I’d like to introduce T.E.A.S. to you. This is something I came up with yesterday which requires a lot of fantasy some good thinking planning and enthusiastic people. So, let’s get started. What is it about? Testing Exploration Adventure Session is about. Testing! There. No real surprise, eh? TEAS has it’s roots in RPGs. Role Playing Games. If you ever heard or read about M.A.G.U.S. or the more known Dungeons & Dragons you will have a better understanding of the concept behind this phenomena. ...

December 1, 2012 · 5 min · hannibal

How to eliminate a parameter boom

Hello folks. Today I want to write about a little trick I learned. If you are working with legacy code and you don’t have the chance to eliminate core design problems, you can use this little pattern to help you out. Problem Problem is that you have a class that has a gazillion collaborators and at some point in time one of the clever devs thought it would be a cool idea to do dependancy injection via the constructor. We all know that doing this makes the class immutable which is very good for a number of reasons. However it doesn’t provide a flexible solution if you want to leave out one or two collabs. For that your would have to create Adapter constructors and chain them upwards which would get very ugly very fast. While using JavaBeans getters and setters can leave your class in a harmful state like not at all or partially initialised. ...

October 9, 2012 · 3 min · hannibal

Coderetreat London

Hello everybody. So yesterday I was on a little gathering called Coderetreat. If you look at the link you can read everything about it. If not, I’ve provided a short description. What it is about? So what is codereatreat about? In short it’s about programmers getting together and honing and practicing there skills in order to become more at what they are doing. It’s a practice run with great people. TDDing one problem the whole day long with constantly applied constraints. ...

September 30, 2012 · 5 min · hannibal

What my brain is up to the whole day…

Hello folks. Here is a little graphic I made to show what my brain is up to the whole day long. Excuse me for the lack of my colouring skills. Enjoy ![Brain]1 Thanks for reading! Gergely. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7604030/barinColored.jpg ↩︎

September 20, 2012 · 1 min · hannibal

Learning programming with a visual mind

Hi folks. Today I want to write to you about learning something with a visual mind. There are a gazillion posts out there that tell you how to learn something with a visual mind. However, there are only a few actually describing how to learn something as complicated and logical as programming. How do you draw up a function? How do you draw up a cycle or a structure? Actually these are really easy. A cycle? No problem. What’s a circle if not a cycle? Structure? This should be an easy one. You can draw a whole building and then place building blocks into it. ...

September 9, 2012 · 3 min · hannibal

TDD and Game of Life

So today at 8-12PM I had a great session with two friends of mine. It was awesome. Like a mini code retreat. We set down in a musky bar, drank wine and beer and cider, and decided to practice some TDD with the well known problem of Conway’s Game of Life. This challenge is really interesting. I never done it before, ever. So it was a really good practice for me. ...

July 12, 2012 · 3 min · hannibal

Journey into an unknown system

Aka, what you can do if you are facing and unknown framework / system you have to work with for quite some time. Get intimate You are going to live with this system for a while. The best thing you can do is getting to know it better. You have to get it to know like you would approche a fine lady. You have to ask it questions look after it, how it feels how its day was. Have to listen to what it tells you, you have to read its diary if necessary. ...

June 28, 2012 · 2 min · hannibal