A little while ago, I mentioned that I’d be writing more about session-based test management (SBTM). For me, one thing that’s great about having a community of students and colleagues is that they can save me lots of time and work.
Selena Delesie took the Rapid Software Testing course from me a few years back (that is, she was a student). Since then, she has taken Rapid Testing and its practices, including SBTM, and made them her own. This is exactly what James Bach and I aim for. We want to help testers, test leads, and managers realize the the most important factor in excellent testing, bar none, is the mindset and the skill set of the individual tester. This means taking the ideas in the course and internalizing them, adopting them, developing them, experimenting with them, altering them to fit your context. We get people started by making them feel powerful, mostly by helping them to recognize the power and skills that they already have. Then, after the class, they can feel confident in doing the heavy lifting on their own. Selena is by no means our only student who has done that, but she’s a paradigmatic example of what’s possible.
This post from her blog is a nice account of her appreciation of exploratory testing and of her career growth. That on its own would be good enough, but she’s now blogged a post on chartering sessions, and it’s excellent. It identifies some of the common traps and misconceptions about chartering, and provides some sharp advice on how to avoid them. It talks not merely about how to charter, but how to do it in a way that affords the tester the freedom and responsibility to do his or her best work. Highest recommendation.