We will all be involved in writing posts, either individually or as collaborative blogs on a particular topic.
The initial question that we asked, in a way to introduce ourselves was:
How did you get into testing?
Chris Armstrong (@christovskia)
Chris brought us all together after our paths have all crossed with him at various points in his career.
I was a tester for more than nine years before I was ‘into’ testing. I tested games. It wasn’t until I went to a conference (in this case EuroSTAR) that I realised that the world of software testing had its own community, sense of identity and that there were blogs and a wealth of amazing minds out there who could help inform and feed my yearnings to learn more, to keep my interests up and grow.
Simon Prior (@siprior)
For me, I spent 4 years as a frustrated junior developer who got none of the meaty projects because there were 5-6 devs who had 10 plus years experience, so I started offering to help out with QA tasks etc and found I really enjoyed them. Eventually moved over as a perm QA on the same team and then started discovering the testing community and found opportunities to grow, attended inspiring conferences which then encouraged me to not only develop myself but also set up a testing Meetup and also try and give careers talks on testing to universities as I realised that students knew nothing about it.
Russell Craxford (@r_crax)
Myself it was luck, was bored in a job between uni years, volunteered to write training manual for new internal software. It was useless couldn’t write manual so told them and thus they set up UAT. They booked in 2 weeks and 9 month later we finished. I ended up building test plans etc off my own back so became their first tester, then built a test function. Seem I’m a mixture of pedantic, organised and good at breaking stuff. Original inspiration was Dr Stuart Reed after a SIGIST talk in London
David Maynard
I fell into testing after leaving teaching over 20 years ago. I started a new role on a help desk supporting computers in schools. All new educational software had to be tested that it worked with our software however I wasn’t a ‘tester’. I then went few a few years of being a programmer and after I got made redundant started work as a tester for a smallish startup doing home automation. I then got into embedded testing and then worked with Bob and Chris for a bit and then finally got my current role that I have worked you to be a group lead. My current testing role is not explicitly software there is also a hardware element as well.