What is Your Goal For September?

[heather_reid]

Keeping the momentum going from the AMA we had with @undevelopedbruce, I’d like to know:

What is your goal for September?

I think it would be great to set our goals here and celebrate with each other when we achieve them

[brian_seg (Brian Segurson)]

Professional: Get my (inherited from another tester) automated tests up to 100% working
Professional: Get to the point where newly implemented funcationality goes to me to test by default (programmers are currently doing most of their own testing, which is good… but not desired… yet) (Interesting side point … very long term goals (multi-year) might actually BE programmers doing their own testing, but we aren’t there yet.)
Personal: Now that the house is renovated, move back in by October.

[heather_reid]

Professional: Get The Club categories tidied up
Professional: Get a “How to” area set up
Personal: Get our house build started

[shamaho (Shafik)]

@brian_seg

Professional: Get to the point where newly implemented funcationality goes to me to test by default (programmers are currently doing most of their own testing, which is good… but not desired… yet) (Interesting side point … very long term goals (multi-year) might actually BE programmers doing their own testing, but we aren’t there yet.)

That’s interesting, do you find programmers can adopt the testers mindset ? do you have them testing their own stuff (possibly high risk due to embedded assumptions?) or stuff developed by another programmer ?

[shamaho (Shafik)]

1. enjoy my vacation coming up
2. conclude coursera workload (pending for months now)

Most important - and unlikely to accomplish
3. Figure out what I want to do next professionally ?

Anybody has some framework to direct working through goal 3 ?

[oconis (Ben Oconis)]

I love the idea of sharing this on the community.

Professional: Audit our current automated tests and find gaps we can close
Professional: Find someone to take up my business case to add more smoke tests
Personal: Clear out my office to make room for a second kid bedroom as my 4 month old is growing too quickly.

[undevelopedbruce (Bruce Bruce)]

I like that we’re including all of the goals, not just work related ones! This is awesome, I love you all. Look at those goals!

Mine for September are

Professional: Finish all my mandatory training on time (I was a day late for August >.>)
Professional: Put in a request for the company to pay for Pro membership
Professional: Plan/organise/cost up the work (virtual) Christmas do
Professional: Help team get localisation out the door, particularly by focussing and grouping issues because having 100 bugs that are variations on the same thing is just way too annoying to manage and navigate for the people who didn’t make them

Brand: Publish a blinkin blog post
Brand: Finish up the Circular Esofreyan page and publish (I have like 20+ illustrations left to do T-T)

Personal: Write 50k words of fanfiction for the fic swap whose prompt I received yesterday (eeeeee)
Personal: Draw something every day

Not too much xD

[mcgovernaine (Áine McGovern)]

I’m totally jumping on this to help me focus on the things.

Professional: Get more creative with MoT sharing on all platforms
Professional: Finish my digital marketing books and put together a practical, trackable, fresher plan
Professional: Do at least 2 hours of deep work a day

Personal: Knit the sleeve of my jumper
Personal: Edit vlog about doing our garden sort out
Personal: Do more 121 yoga teaching and not freak out
Personal: Get to grips with my endo diet and fix shiz.

All doable and have been broken down into bite sizes to get me out of my frozen state

[mcgovernaine (Áine McGovern)]

Not sure anyone has the magic answer to that one! If you do figure it out, it could make you very wealthy!

[undevelopedbruce (Bruce Bruce)]

@mcgovernaine

Professional: Do at least 2 hours of deep work a day

What is this deep work of which you speak?

[mcgovernaine (Áine McGovern)]

@undevelopedbruce

What is this deep work of which you speak?

It’s basically non-distraction filled work. Single tasking, focusing. That sort of idea. This will give you a better idea Deep Work: The Complete Guide (Inc. a Step-by-Step Checklist) . I’m very easily distracted, so I need to do something. So I’ve website blockers in place and a pomodoro timer on hand to help keep me focused. I need to build better habits.

[undevelopedbruce (Bruce Bruce)]

Woah this is excellent. I’m gunna enact a Deep Work Routine!
Location: At my desk, with the bedroom door and windows closed to block out the distracting park sounds
Duration: 90mins between 8am and 9:35am with a 5min break in the middle to make another cup of tea
Structure: I will throw my phone on my bed out of sight for the time, will not open hangouts, and will only open slack if there is something I need there for the task
Requirements: I’ll drink tea, and if I want music I’ll grab a 2h study beats mix from YT, not my “Absolute Bangers” playlist

[mike_123 (Mike lang)]

Get ready for Xmas! Seriously. By clearing out old things ready for the new year.
Minimalist here I come!

[christovskia (Chris Armstrong)]

I’m am a bit overawed by all of these goals, but feel compelled to add my own.

Professional: I’m into my second month in my new job. Time to start implementing changes and begin to feel like I’m being useful. We are exploring lots of things, time to move beyond talking about them. I need to make stuff happen.
Professional: Workshops on exploratory testing, team charters, one page test plan, riskstorming and more need to be in the calendar at the very least!

Brand: Put more effort into accessibility for my blog and also the Testing Peers podcast
Brand: Write at least one personal blog post
Brand: Publish two more episodes of our podcast and hit 2k downloads!

Personal: Lose some COVID lbs. MyFitnessPal will be my tracking tool of choice
Personal: Get house on the market

[testervenkat (Venkat Ramakrishnan)]

Goal for September is:

1. To master ElasticSearch/Kibana
2. To make some headway in NLP/Deep Learning

[mcgovernaine (Áine McGovern)]

@undevelopedbruce

Woah this is excellent. I’m gunna enact a Deep Work Routine!
Location: At my desk, with the bedroom door and windows closed to block out the distracting park sounds
Duration: 90mins between 8am and 9:35am with a 5min break in the middle to make another cup of tea
Structure: I will throw my phone on my bed out of sight for the time, will not open hangouts, and will only open slack if there is something I need there for the task
Requirements: I’ll drink tea, and if I want music I’ll grab a 2h study beats mix from YT, not my “Absolute Bangers” playlist

Sounds ace. I do similar. Mute slack, only open tabs I need, hide phone, chill playlist, focus on one task. I’m still working on it, but it’s getting easier. Practice makes practically perfect.

[jon_thompson]

My goal is to complete my first read through of the ISTQB Agile Foundations textbook.

[ipstefan (Stefan Papusoi)]

That was awful for me. Lots of confusion and non-relevant, weak or conflicting statements.
I skimmed for 30 minutes the book. Then did the exam for fun. Passed with about 80%. More than 50% of the exam questions had either wrong questions or partially correct answers.

Since that point(~3 years ago) I decided not to touch anything ISTQB related even for checking out stuff they do.
For the same amount of money for paying just the exam for ISTQB you can do a BBST or a RST Explored online class.
I’m going, as some of the other peers in Context Driven Testing, with the fact that ISTQB is a scam…

My goal for September - try not to check the ministryoftesting club a few times per day, but once every 2 weeks as a first step.
It’s eating too much of my free time…

[a_miller (Alaine)]

Professional:

• Know what I’m doing with Node.js
• Complete Architecting on AWS training
• Start a blog
• Help run my first Meet-up
• Tech talk on shift left & shift right

Personal:

• Lose some more weight
• Fit in more exercise
• Sew something
• Make some jewellery

[oconis (Ben Oconis)]

Do you have any thoughts on the topic of your first blog?