More about the points

Thoughts in your head are different when spoken out loud.

During the class (and exercises) I was thinking of many good ideas. And when speaking them out loud – I struggled to get the message across. Not because of the language or something like that – but because I had not thought them through.

This gave me excellent opportunity to (wrongly) feel good about myself whenever anyone said anything along the lines I had thought – making me feel that I had thought of the same thing but in a bit different wording.

RST class debriefing 2

As promised, more words about what I learned from the class.

In Short:

James did not teach us how to test per se, but showed us how difficult it is and what we skills we need (to develop) in order to get really good at testing.

In Long:

It was not that during the class something entirely new was said. But the points were made in such a way it was impossible to miss them. True to the old saying – “You will not learn that the fire is hot until you burn your fingers.” – James gave us exercises and showed how easy it is to fall into the traps. When we were trying to struggle out he would ask – what testing method are you using right now ?! Which heuristic are You using ?! What Oracle are you using ?! Are you sure ?!

RST class debriefing.

I attended the Rapid Software Testing class at 20-22 of October 2010, in Tartu, Estonia.

In short: It was a loads of fun, studded with pains of humiliation. Well, actually the latter was seldom and even more educating than the fun parts.

In long:

Three full days of listening, thinking and talking. To get things rolling he started with the pattern exercise, which was fine by me, as I had already done it with him over Skype. Turned out that they had changed it a bit, so I had hard time figuring out what that was. We, as a group, did fairly well and everyone got the idea that this is not going to be the general boring thing.