ACT 2 LEAD

Last week at the SEETEST 2024 conference in Zagreb, Marko and Kari delivered a successful and thought-provoking presentation about the importance of taking the needed actions at all leadership levels to lead testing to make it efficient. There were great discussions after the presentation in the conference room and discussions continued also afterwards. Also, there were many great AI and testing talks. Inspired by the AI talks, we gave the ACT2LEAD acronym (as described in Chapter 5.3 of our book) to GenerativeAI Claude 3.5 Sonnet. We asked it to act as Head of Testing of a large company and create a test policy aligned with the ACT2LEAD heuristic. Here's the answer that the AI gave us. It is not formatted at all - not too bad, don't you think? Would you use it as is in your own organization?   Testing Policy: ACT2LEAD Approach   1. Add Testing Everywhere:    - Integrate testing into every phase of the software development lifecycle.    - Encourage all...

Big day! Big news! After a busy summer of translating our successful Finnish ACT 2 LEAD book to English, we were finally ready to push the button and publish the book on Leanpub on Oct 23, 2024. The timing was no coincidence. We had a talk coming up at the SEETEST Sept 27, 2024 conference about the topic of the book: Taking Action to Lead Software Testing. Also, the Finnish book was published exactly 11 months ago - Oct 23, 2023! The book is now available at  https://leanpub.com/act2lead where you can buy it as a PDF version. The super thing about Leanpub is that it allows an iterative way to publish a book. This means that we can, and are even expected to update the book regularly until we have tuned it based on feedback we get from the readers. And, everyone who has bought the book will get all the upcoming versions of the book, too. So, the book just gets better and better! For the SEETEST conference goers, there's a conference promo code: SEETEST2024 for 20 USD at https://leanp...

Exciting news! Our book has finally made its debut on Goodreads! Though the process took a bit longer than anticipated, what matters most is that you can now rate our book with stars and share your comments. Better yet, we can engage in discussions right there on the platform! While we've already received plenty of feedback, primarily through LinkedIn and word of mouth, it's been overwhelmingly positive. Readers appreciate the thoughts, examples, and learnings we've shared, particularly the real-life examples. These cases serve to solidify and enrich the lessons, making them more tangible and memorable. However, one issue with the feedback we've received thus far is its fleeting nature. Though certainly not forgotten by us, it tends to slip from readers' minds over time. It's akin to a one-time event, often buried amidst the noise of social media feeds. With Goodreads, though, we aim to remedy this. By centralizing feedback on the platform, we ensure that it...

It has been a busy winter for us. Not only in our daily work but also around the book. After the book was published five months ago, we agreed to focus on sharing our learnings for students. That was our first priority. And oh-boy, this is what we really have been doing! We have visited several Univertities and Universities of Applied Sciences. To be exact, we have visited 10 of them already, meaning we both have used around 50 hours for this. It is quite a big investment, as our calendars are pretty full already with other duties. But, man's gotta do what man's gotta do. Some of the talks were on-site, and some were remote. And the journey won't stop here: we will continue this in the future. In addition to this, we have been talking in podcasts, companies and in one hospital too. And our first public training will be this week! We have been asked how to get to the schools. We used one secret method for this. It is called "asking." We think that it is a bit under...

Huh, what a ride it has been after the launch of our book! Sales are doing well, and in addition to that, we have had five events related to our book during November (see https://www.act2lead.net/p/news-and-presentations.html ): Knowit Agile Agent podcast ACT 2 LEAD talk in one insurance company's internal QA community FiSTB Testing Assembly, to sign and discuss around the book Leading of software testing -talk for South-Eastern Finland University of Applied Sciences – Xamk ACT 2 LEAD talks in Tieturi webinar: Story of the book + What is ACT 2 LEAD It is hard work to talk, as talk is about talking and thinking (what to say, how to say it, etc). It helps when the topic is so close to our hearts: software testing and how to lead it. Even though the topic and slides are the same, the talks and words are never the same. There are always some differences, which we spot as we discuss. And that is how it should be. Actually, it was the way the book was created, too. Also, talking to stude...

 The book  is now officially launched! The publishing party was kept on 23.10.2023. We had about 20 people celebrating the launch of the book with us. There were our families, friends, reviewers and, of course, testing professionals too. The party was opened by our publisher, Reino Myllymäki from Ketterät Kirjat Oy. He gave a short introduction to our book project from his point of view, and he raised a toast for us. Cheers! Reino also mentioned how it was to make a book with testers. According to him, the most significant difference was how we reported bugs and findings from the book in its editing phase, as we reported those quite detailed... as we would report bugs. At least there was no chance of misunderstandings, as we had about 12 rounds of editing. After the lovely words from Reino, Marko introduced the story of making the book. He shared the observations and conclusions of why we believed, and still believe, that there is a need to change how people THINK about testin...