In the same way I did last year, I have picked a ‘word of the year’ (see my posts from late 2012 ‘Word of The Year 2013‘ and December 2013, ‘A Year of Explore‘).
For 2014, I go for ‘Create’:
Do you pick a word of the year for 2014? Which one?
A Year of ‘Explore’
At the end of last year, I decided I would not make any new year’s resolutions in favour of selecting a ‘word of the year’, see the blog post from early 2013. I picked the word ‘explore‘ for 2013 and since the year is (nearly) over, it’s time to look back and see how it worked out.
The Black Box Software Testing Courses
At the time of this writing there are four BBST (Black Box Software Testing) courses the Association for Software Testing offers:
I took the first three of them in the first half of 2013, and the last one in October. And while I do recommend taking these courses, I have to say that I needed a good amount of time to work through all the material, labs & exercises. Especially the ‘Test Design’ course offered a phenomenal amount of material.
I totally recommend these courses to everyone working in software testing and software development in general.
Conferences
For a while now, I try to go to two conferences each year, a programmer conference as well as a tester conference. I used to recommend this to my fellow ‘programming tester colleagues’, but now I’ve also started to recommend it to the ‘testing programmers’ as well. While I focus on software testing, I find it useful to know a bit about programming, too.
I hoped to be able to go to the EuRuKo (European Ruby Conference) in Athens, Greece in summer. In the end it didn’t work out as planned and I couldn’t go. However, I gave my ticket away and received two post cards in return. Thank you, you know who you are.
In September I attended the BARUCO, the ‘Barcelona Ruby Conference’ in Spain, and in October I went to the Agile Testing Days in Potsdam, Germany. At both conferences I gave short presentations about testing and the two values of software. Furthermore, at the Agile Testing Days I had the pleasure to assist Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory at the beginning of their keynote presentation:
A remark: The BBST Instructors course and the Agile Testing Days overlapped a bit. If you can, I suggest to avoid a commitment like that. Although it did work for me (in the end), this is a way of exploring, I’ll avoid in the future.
Projects
Early this year, I wanted to try some rather short software testing projects and joined uTest (now renamed to be Applause), where I worked on several apps for mobile devices as well as OS X. Given my background with longer running projects, having just a few days for testing was a refreshing experience. I also joined a project using Calabash to automate testing (well, checking actually) on Android devices.
In late June I joined a new longer running project using a whole bunch of technologies I’ve heard about before, but which were new to me – Another way to explore! So now I work in a project using MongoDB, Varnish, Puppet and Vagrant. All of them are really interesting technologies, and the team doesn’t stop there: Every now and then we take a day to, well, explore new ways that may improve our work.
Summary
It’s been a very exciting and busy year and I am convinced that picking a ‘word of the year’ instead of making new year’s resolutions made a big difference. Instead of a plan, I felt I had some guidance that helped in deciding what to do (and what not to do in some cases). I will pick a word of the year for 2014 as well and if you also pick one, or if you already had one for 2013, why not write a short comment whether (or not) it helped you and in which way?
Word of The Year 2013
The general idea of the “word of the year” isn’t particularly new: It seems to be popular in many languages and countries, according to the English Wikipedia, the German Wikipedia entry (other languages at the time of this writing are: Česky, Dansk, Esperanto, Français and Nederlands).
However, I got the idea to pick a personal word of the year from my wife. This idea goes at least back to a blog post by Ali Edwards. The notion (as I understand it) is to pick one word to guide you thought that year. To me this is an interesting change to the more traditional new years resolutions, since it conveys the idea of having a guidance, or vision rather than setting (usually) unreachable high aims.
It seems to me that a personal word of the year helps to move into a chosen direction. In a way it’s very much like a good vision for Scrum (and other!) software development teams — vision condensed into a single word. For all your small and bigger assignments you can quickly check, if what you’re attempting matches the idea of your chosen word, and then consciously decide if or how to proceed.
My word of the year 2013 is:
Do you pick a word of the year for 2013? Which one?
