“As a manager, James always looked to create opportunities for each team member to develop the next skills needed or desired, whether they were for the current role or a different role. His software testing and technical expertise always brought new ideas to the team and supported critical thinking. All these aspects have helped build a great, skilled and engaged team. I'm grateful for the opportunity to learn from James and for all the support he has given me as my line manager.”
About
I'm a tester who values both expertise and experience.
Activity
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You should have questions but you shouldn't always ask them. #testing Blogged: Why Question? https://lnkd.in/esWv2r7X
You should have questions but you shouldn't always ask them. #testing Blogged: Why Question? https://lnkd.in/esWv2r7X
Shared by James Thomas
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My monthly Association for Software Testing Board of Directors work report is up on my blog. If you would like to become a better tester, advance the…
My monthly Association for Software Testing Board of Directors work report is up on my blog. If you would like to become a better tester, advance the…
Liked by James Thomas
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How might you answer the question "why don't we replace the testers with AI?" Blogged: ChatGPTesters https://lnkd.in/eHmPDw5G cc/Association for…
How might you answer the question "why don't we replace the testers with AI?" Blogged: ChatGPTesters https://lnkd.in/eHmPDw5G cc/Association for…
Shared by James Thomas
Experience
Education
Licenses & Certifications
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Automation in Testing
Automation in Testing
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Licensed Scrum Master
Scrum Inc.
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Rapid Introduction to Rapid Software Testing
Developsense
Publications
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Peers Exchanging Ideas: The AST Peer Conference Guide
Association for Software Testing
So you’ve decided you want to run a peer conference? Well done! In our experience, getting together with fellow practitioners, in a comfortable and safe environment, with time to immerse yourselves in topics of mutual interest, is not only a great learning experience but also tremendously enjoyable.
When we say peer conference we don’t have a particular format in mind. Your conference might be a traditional series of talks followed by Q&A, it could be an unfacilitated discussion, it…So you’ve decided you want to run a peer conference? Well done! In our experience, getting together with fellow practitioners, in a comfortable and safe environment, with time to immerse yourselves in topics of mutual interest, is not only a great learning experience but also tremendously enjoyable.
When we say peer conference we don’t have a particular format in mind. Your conference might be a traditional series of talks followed by Q&A, it could be an unfacilitated discussion, it could use a crowdsourced agenda, or be a focussed group working to produce some kind of report on a topic of shared interest.
Adrian Segar describes a peer conference as “a conference that is small, attendee-driven, inclusive, structured, safe, supportive, interactive, community-building, and provides opportunities for personal and group reflection and action.”
We like that kind of framing as it provides room for many local variants, although we’d add that disseminating the results of the conference could be an important outcome too. If we had to boil down our own perspective, it would be something like this: peers exchanging ideas. -
When Support Calls
Ministry of Testing
It's not uncommon for testers to be asked to help out on support calls. It makes sense: testers often act as advocates for the customer, testers get to view a product in the round, and testers have usually seen many of the error cases that customers might encounter.
Support calls are like testing because they're about generating ideas, testing hypotheses, and getting to the bottom of a problem. But support calls are also not like testing because they're in front of a customer who'd…It's not uncommon for testers to be asked to help out on support calls. It makes sense: testers often act as advocates for the customer, testers get to view a product in the round, and testers have usually seen many of the error cases that customers might encounter.
Support calls are like testing because they're about generating ideas, testing hypotheses, and getting to the bottom of a problem. But support calls are also not like testing because they're in front of a customer who'd rather be somewhere else, with an issue they don't want and an expectation that you will resolve it.
In this series, we'll introduce some support call basics, talk about how to prepare for a call, suggest some ways to survive and even thrive on the call, show how to end the call, and then think about what kinds of things can be done to cement what you learned afterwards.
We think this is a great introduction for testers who've never done support before and are about to get involved, a helpful enumeration of the kind of wisdom that old hands already learned the hard way, and useful background on the technical support role for others.Other authorsSee publication -
Your Testing is a Joke
EuroSTAR 2015
Your Testing is a Joke won the Best Paper prize at EuroSTAR 2015. It's an extension of the talk I gave at the conference on the parallels I see between joking and testing and it deconstructs a genuine joke-making process to compare aspects of joking and testing such as factoring, stopping strategies and bug advocacy and explains how I use that to practice testing skills.
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Make Like a Tester
uTest
Thoughts for testers starting a new job. With butter, elephants, Stephen Hawking and a sponge.
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Not Sure About Uncertainty
Ministry of Testing
Thoughts on known/unknowns, quantifiable and unquantifiable risks, testing models incorporating them and their relationship to risk-based testing.
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My Software Under Test and Other Animals
Ministry of Testing
Describing the state of the software you're working on using the analogy of animal skin patterns.
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Ontology-Based Interactive Information Extraction from Scientific Abstracts
Proc. of BioLINK SIG Text Mining Workshop, ISMB/ECCB 2004
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Automatic Extraction of Protein Interactions from Scientific Abstracts
Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing
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From Information Retrieval to Information Extraction
Proceedings of the ACL-2000 workshop on Recent advances in natural language processing and information retrieval
Projects
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I2E
- Present
Linguamatics' core product, I2E, is a world leading natural language processing text mining system.
Other creatorsSee project
Organizations
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Association for Software Testing
Director
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More activity by James
Where to start when confronted with an unfamiliar domain and terminology? Blogged: A Model Prank https://lnkd.in/eURR2JJt #testing #model
Shared by James Thomas
Ideas don't always lead somewhere but the thrill of the chase and the knowledge banked can be their own reward. Blogged: Not Strictly for the Birds
Shared by James Thomas
When confronted with an open-ended problem in a complex context, take an oblique approach. Blogged: Oblique Strategies https://lnkd.in/eM8JYJYG…
Shared by James Thomas
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