Chicken for Christmas – Tradition is a choice

TL;DR: Testing is always something that we choose to do – and how we test is similarly a matter of choice. As is Christmas traditions. .. it’s just man-made rules, we can choose to change them.

So I was discussing what we should have for Christmas with the stakeholders. One of them wants the traditional rice pudding, the other wants – untraditionally: chicken. And you know what – that’s ok. Traditions are guidelines, not rules – we can make new traditions, just by choosing to.

Testing in production used to be a great no-no. I’m still feeling odd when we do it, but I have come to see it as another tool of the trade. It has a name now “testing in the wild” TTitW as has been presented at EuroStar 2015. Also this is how Netflix have been testing for years, from GitHub, as it is open source too (!).

You might argue that changing testing (in the wild) is not allowed. I will challenge that assumption – being allowed to do something is a choice too. You choose to follow the the process frameworks, requirements, rules… and you can choose not to. The tradition of manual predefined testcases are so four years ago!

Sometimes it’s just a matter of saying up-front, that you are tailoring the process. So choose an approach that actually gives meaning and value to the stakeholders and context. Deconstruct the traditions and commercial bodies of knowledge and make some new!

http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=64241

Lego Role Models

Who had the family’s largest LEGO set this Christmas – it was the 11-year-old and their 8 wheel 42008 Service Truck – 1276 pieces, power functions, pneumatic, gears and 44 cm forcefulness. There was no band merchandise, no glitter or similar gender framing. Quite a project – as is the story about the “Research Institute” mini-figure set.

LEGO segway and Friends

Untitled, a photo by jlottosen on Flickr.

That’s what friends are for

“Simon”, 6yo, wants a LEGO Friends set [3930]. The furniture and cakes is for their hero mini-figure “The Rescue Diver” of the city “Runkelberg”. Stephanie in the set will be a doll, that the evil villain “Thorkild” can hammer. The Rescue Diver has the power of having a shadow that can move independently – while the oldest sing “Batman’s  lone hero song – being a long way away from home“.

//Keep smiling – keep shining – Knowing you can always count on me – for sure //

A colleague brought homemade cupcakes to work yesterday. I had the day off – but they saved one for me for the next day. A colleague in another department is not in – text her. She’s ill and send my best wishes. Writing to a friend, about a former colleague just home from hospital – here chocolate is being ordered.

Even superheros need help

IMG_8630, a photo by jlottosen on Flickr.

LEGO Friends sewing club helps out superman

Olivia’s new car – they work in tech, obviously

IMG_8531, a photo by jlottosen on Flickr.

Olivia Friends’ new white VW beetle cabriolet – an AFOL LEGO MOC

See also: More women in testing,

More Diversity in testing

I see more Diversity in software testing than among developers in general. Too bad that the ratio among developers is low – but good for software testing :-). It is proof to me that Software testing is a skill of many skills and that people from different backgrounds come together to make the testing groups diverse. Some  come with strong domain expertise and user experiences others with people skills – and others with tech skills on par with the best. How to get more Diversity in software testing and tech – Miss more in the pink aisle perhaps.

So I probably need both a question mark and exclamation point in the title…

[ The Build-A-Tester Workshop |  MARCH 13, 2012 | jlottosen ]

you might find initial engagement and strengths in a team of like-minded people – the team with the right mix of types for the context has the best options and is likely to be more successful. Said in other words a team consisting of only one ”type” would be good at only a few things and not so good in the rest.

See also What is is – is beautiful and Being Different is key

This is what we missed in the pink aisle

They learned. So. Much. They accomplished something really interesting, and fairly difficult (I know because I’ve helped out with a number of those things myself). They played aliens with their twelve year old sibling, and built things with them, and they so very, very rarely play together anymore.

See also Pink Bricks are not new in LEGO

Kel Bachus

An engineer friend of mine recently extolled to me the virtues of Legos for teaching math and engineering concepts to children.

As he talked, I thought back to my experiences with Legos, which had been somewhat limited and mostly involved building square house shapes and furnishing them with benches and tables.  I realized that even as a girl raised in a fairly feminist, evolved family, my first real experience with a schematic really didn’t come until I was a teenager when for a while I built and painted model airplanes.

My daughter, who’s seven, has lots of Legos.  They’re in enormous bins that live under beds or in closets, and mostly get dumped out in a sea of pointy plastic.  They stay on the floor like a huge spreading oil spill with as much collateral damage, like when I inevitably step on one in an entirely different room of the…

View original post 731 more words

Listen very carefully – I shall say this only once

I shall say this only once, a photo by jlottosen on Flickr.

Pink LEGO is not new to the Friends theme

[ JANUARY 15, 2012 | The Brick Life | INGER ]

“Pink bricks and elements have been included in LEGO sets for decades. The new colors introduced to create the LEGO Friends collection are two blues, two purples and two greens”

[ For Lego, Pink Is the New Black | Bloomberg Businessweek |By Brad Wieners on February 22, 2013 ]

Our data show that we tripled the number of girls who are building with Lego bricks in the U.S. market since the launch of Friends, and we’ve significantly shifted the gender split among Lego users,” says Michael McNally, Lego’s U.S. spokesman. Independent data appear to back up Lego’s claims. Retail researchers NPD Group tracks Lego Friends in its Building Sets category. If you compare Lego Friends dollar volume with similar volume in the Dolls Play Sets category (where it is sometimes merchandised in stores), Friends comes out on top: the No. 1 property of 2012.