People in Testing Interview with Eddy Bruin

Eddy Bruin - Adventures in QAThis time in the “People in Testing” series, I had the chance to interview Eddy Bruin, who is an agile test coach in the Netherlands. Eddy is the co-founder of BUXIT, a community which goal it is to improve products through attention for User Experience.

Daniel: What is currently your biggest challenge at work?

Eddy: I’m currently an Agile coach in a big firm. It’s all pretty new to them and most of the developers are working on the other end of the world. My biggest challenge is coaching these people with the limited facilities we have. Only talking to a phone is hardly enough to create a team spirit and to communicate effectively. The biggest test challenge in this aspect is letting the team realize there are more ways to test besides exhaustive checking while treating the application as a complete black box. Let’s say that every time we change the color of the car the testers want to test the gearbox again.

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People in Testing Interview with Markus Gärtner

People in Testing Q&A with Markus Gärtner - Adventures in QAThis time in “People in Testing” I had the chance to interview Markus Gärtner, the author of ATDD by Example – A Practical Guide to Acceptance Test-Driven Development and one of the most influential agile testing professional person (Awarded in 2013).

Daniel: Markus, what is currently your biggest challenge at work?

Markus: Right now, I am working with a client on introducing Scrum in both the medical world as well as constructing medical equipment, rather than software development. Although, I we just started, I feel engaged by the amount of things that I learn in order to make this happen.

On another note, I work in a company where we enjoy lots of freedom together with self-direction and self-management. Though the stuff you read about it-agile, if you dive into the background, and are part of it, it’s very hard work. Right now, we are on the edge of hopefully overcoming some of the struggles that come with self-organization.

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People in Testing Q&A with Rudolf Groetz

Rudolf Groetz - Adventures in QAThis time in “People in Testing” I had the chance to interview Rudolf Groetz, who is the founder and organizer of the Mobile Quality Night. Rudolf is Head of QA at JUMIO Inc. with a mobile mindset. He has very good knowledge in the area of mobile testing and especially in mobile test automation. In this interview Rudolf is talking about his current mobile testing challenge, which kind of test automation solution he is using and what is the next big thing in the software development and testing world. Enjoy the interview.

Daniel: What is currently your biggest challenge at work?

Rudolf: For me the biggest challenge at the moment is the ever rising device fragmentation in the mobile world. This problem forces me to constantly adapt our mobile device lab, furthermore I need to check that our app is still working with the latest SDK’s and on new devices our customers are using. For our testing process we are using only physical devices and no emulators or simulators. We have a mobile device lab in our office, if there are devices that are not part of the mobile device lab, we are also using Mobile Device Clouds. Those devices are used for manual as well as automated mobile testing.

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People in Testing Q&A with Tobias Geyer

Tobias Geyer - Adventures in QAThis time in “People in Testing” I had the chance to interview Tobias Geyer, who is a former colleague and one of my hardest proof readers of my book. Tobias has a very good testing knowledge and is this kind of guy who is catching the really nasty bugs. If you are on twitter you have to follow him @the_qa_guy.


Daniel: Tobias, what is currently your biggest challenge at work?

Tobias: My biggest challenge right now is to get a better understanding of the domain I’m working in to provide a more valuable testing to my team. The application we’re building is not that complex but it deals with the complex AUTOSAR standard. Each new version has a few features which I can test with my current knowledge and a lot of features where a detailed AUTOSAR knowledge is needed.
Luckily there are other people which support us with testing the AUTOSAR features but I’d really love to have this knowledge in the team as well.

What kind of test automation tool are you using during your workday?

Apart from the omnipresent Jenkins server I’m working with JUnit and froglogic Squish GUI Tester.

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People in Testing Q&A with Ryan Arsenault

Ryan Arsenault - Adventures in QA

This time in the “People in Testing” series, I had the chance to interview Ryan Arsenault who is a Community Manager at uTest. Ryan is working with more than 175,000 software testers from around the world and he has a different view of the software testing industry. I am really glad to get the chance to interview him and to provide his answers in this post to get an idea what other people think of software testers.

Daniel: What is currently your biggest challenge at uTest?

Ryan: I would say that like with any community — especially with ours in how fast we’ve grown with over 175,000 software testers now — the biggest challenge is always providing the content and context to keep people engaged.

How do you match paid projects to the testers strengths, interests, and often devices while simultaneously providing them with opportunities to expand their professional network and career? It’s a daunting challenge, but one that our team is doing an amazing job of, along with our uTester moderators. It also helps that we have some exciting things in the works for later in the year that will continue to allow us to engage at a deep level with our testers as we scale as a community.

You are working together with software testing experts. Have you ever considered to become a software tester?

I’ve never considered becoming one because they’re so much better at it than I ever could be — as they say, I should ‘stick to my day job.’ That being said, working with them for almost two years now at uTest has given me a deep appreciation for what software testers do everyday.

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