What happens when Testers meet up???

Last year I attended a Tester Gathering in London that Tony Bruce organises, I was very impressed with the format and general atmosphere of the event - he's done a great job! So much so, that my colleague Adam Brown and I are now organising a similar event in Nottingham. With lots of help from STC, we are holding the first ever Nottingham STC Meetup on Feb 23rd.

• It will be free to attend and James Bach has kindly agreed to give a presentation!
• Please check Adam’s post with more details of the event.
• And register to the event at the STC meetup site

P.S. I say Adam and I are organising it, the truth is Adam is doing all the work!

 

The Dark Side of Bugs

the 'The Legendary' Pradeep Soundararajan

There is no doubt about it, today's cartoon was inspired by Pradeep Soundararajan. He's a bit of genius, you should check out his blog.
Recently, he emailed me about a couple of cartoon ideas. I love it when this happens, new ideas seem to trigger even more ideas. One negative side effect though, is I end up feeling like a pessimistic developer! There is no way I can meet the [cartoon] requirements, as I will understand the requirements differently to the way people think they have explained them. But not to worry, I always provide a prototype of the cartoon to check it meets some level of satisfaction/quality :o)
Anyway, this cartoon is my representation of Pradeep's idea. Thanks Pradeep!

No user would ever do that

1 Year Anniversary

Today is the Cartoon Tester 1 year anniversary and what a year it has been!
Thank you all for following the blog and leaving comments. Initially I thought I would only run the blog for a few months, but due to the great response I decided that it was definitely worth continuing.

Some of my Highlights for the Tester Cartoon blog include:

• Over 30,000 direct visits to the site – that’s incredible :o)
• Cartoons printed in a number of magazines/newspapers/ebooks:
•     STC: Issues 1, 2, 3, If I was a test case I would
•     STP: Vol. 7 No. 5 and No. 6
• Many Cartoons translated into Russian
• The site is Number 32 in the charts!
• Cartoon Tester display stand at EuroSTAR 2010
• Received a hard copy of I am a bug
• Accepted into the w-a-t group.
• Got free entry to ExpoQA
• Cartoons displayed in Test Conference in Croatia
• Mr. Fails

Wow! What a list! Thank you again for all the great support I’ve received that has made the above a reality.

Recently, a few people have asked when and why I started drawing cartoons about testing. I think some of them were asking ‘Why? Why are you wasting your time drawing stupid cartoons?” but I think others were genuinely interested!

There are a number of reasons why…
One was that I wanted to get more involved in the wider testing industry. One option was to start a typical blog but I knew I wasn’t great at writing articles.
I knew that I had ‘some’ skill at drawing cartoons. I used to draw cartoons about my wife and I and our relationship together. Some of the cartoons made her laugh, so I thought I was unto something as she’s my toughest critic!
Another reason was that I wanted to improve my employability. I thought my CV/resume was boring to read, I felt I needed something extra, something a bit different.
With all this, I started drawing cartoons about testing early 2009 and ended up with around 20-30 cartoons, I submitted them all for review to the first STC magazine. I received such a great response from them that I decided to start this blog. Like they say… and the rest is history :o)

Here’s my updated CV, I had to remove some private information, but I think it looks much better than my old one…

Equality

Lyrical Tester

Happy New Year Everyone!