Maaike Brinkhof's blog

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IT

Articles about software development, testing, coding and IT in general.

UX designer for two days

Over the last few years I’ve always worked with UX designers, but I had never tried being one for two days. I had my chance last week when I was part of a “design pressure cooker” with a mission to make our app “simpler” and to enable our users

Mob Programming Journey - The Start of the Start

Even though mob programming has been around in the way it’s currently known since 2011, I’ve been quite late to join the party. My first experience with it dates back to October 2016, when I had the pleasure of facilitating a workshop with Maaret about Exploratory Testing &

Bashing Code and the Similarities to Bullying

Some developers on my team like to bash code that was written by one person in particular who has left the project 1 year ago. It still seems something they enjoy doing, preferably in groups. I’ve called them out on it, especially when a new person came into the

Selling Quality

After giving a talk about testing to developers, someone in the audience asked: how do you sell testing and quality to the business? How do you get them to realise those are important? Those questions stopped me right in my tracks. In a sense, you never have to sell the

Learning on the Job

I carve out time every day to learn new things while I’m at work. For me, learning can happen in many different ways: I might pair up with someone to work together, I might read a bit in a book about API testing, I might follow a tutorial on

TestBash Utrecht 2018 Liveblog

This TestBash is really special to me. It is the first testing event that I went to since my 10-month hiatus. I’ve started working as a tester again in January this year, but going to this edition of TestBash feels like it makes my return to testing 100% complete.

Mapping Biases to Testing: An Inconvenient Truth

Did you know that having a personal doctor at your disposal could do more harm to your health than good? I’ll explain why. The doctor gets paid by you and with their good intentions wants to do good and be useful. So, they start to assess your bodily health.