Grand Rapids Testers May Meeting
May 8, 2012

Tester Training! 

Cool things we're chatting about before the meeting actually starts - 

Cool tools that are worth a look - Rapid Reporter - http://testing.gershon.info/reporter/

And Away We GO!!!!!!!!!!!

Hmmm - OK - since there were FOUR of us, we went downstairs to SanChez to talk and nosh since people were kinda hungry - something about dinner time and coming straight from work (or Traverse City) - and we lost internet access... so catching up...
 

Conferences - 

STAR *; 
CAST - Conference for the Association of Software Testing - http://www.associationforsoftwaretesting.org/conference/cast-2012/ ; 
PNSQC - Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference - http://www.pnsqc.org/2012-conference ; 
STPCon - Software Test Professionals Conference - http://www.softwaretestpro.com/default.aspx ; 
etc., etc.,


Websites/Blogs – 
Michael Bolton http://www.developsense.com/blog/ 
James Bach http://www.satisfice.com/blog/ 
Bret Petticord http://testingwithvision.com/
Johanna Rothman http://www.jrothman.com/blogs/
Markus Gartner http://www.shino.de/
Phil Kirkham http://expectedresults.blogspot.com/ 
Selena Delesie http://www.selenadelesie.com/ 
Jamws Whittacker http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/ 
Karen Johnson http://karennicolejohnson.com/blog/
Wade Wachs http://www.wadewachs.com/ 
Alan Page  http://angryweasel.com/blog/
Fiona Charles  http://quality-intelligence.blogspot.com/
  
Or, well - go here: http://www.softwarequalityconnection.com/2011/09/29-testers-to-follow-on-twitter/
 
 
Online Forums / Magazines - 
 
SQAForums – http://www.sqaforums.com/ubbthreads.php
TechTarget (warning - this is a pay site) http://searchsoftwarequality.techtarget.com/
StackOverflow – http://stackoverflow.com/
 
Training sources - 
 
AST BBST – http://www.associationforsoftwaretesting.org/training/courses/ 
 
Certifications – well – they may help but…
Do they give us a standard definition across all of them? 
 
What is being learned?
 
Greg – The one thing that can be said is that it gives people who don’t have a vocabulary at hand, a set of terms available for use.
 
We can agree on terms only if we have a common understanding -
 
Wade – 
How do we get people atarted?  Where do we find reliable sources?
 
-    Reach out and find idea sources – 
-    You don’t need to AGREE with those sources
-    Studying the ideas around what people say can help us re-examine our views on testing – what do we really believe, think – and why.
 
Linda & Wade both talked about how hard it was to motivate people to learn more about testing on their own (reading books, magazines, blogs, etc.,)  This is a challenge for passionate testers when working with people who look at this as "just a job."