Alexandre Martins’ Blog

ThoughtWorks Australia is looking for new talents!

This time we are hiring Senior QA Testing Consultants!
So if you want to work in this fast growing, unhierarchical consultancy, applying your knowledge of testing in a variety of client environments while constantly using the latest methodologies and technologies, you can continue reading this post, otherwise, just don’t bother

Working with us, you’ll get to work alongside truly talented teams and help them enhance their performance by bringing quality assurance to the forefront of clients’ minds. As well as ensuring the bug-free delivery of custom built software, you will also be working with clients to advise them on improving their test processes and teaching them about the very latest from the QA world.

Some Of The Duties

Our test processes are very different to many organisations. Testers are involved from the initial requirements gathering through implementation to deployment. They are always around to ask the awkward questions and try scenarios that analysts or developers are unlikely to dream up. They are involved when analysts are capturing requirements in the form of user stories. These stories are then converted into acceptance tests outlining specific scenarios. Testers play a big part in making sure those tests are well defined and complete so that developers know when they have finished implementing the functionality defined in a story. For more information, visit http://testing.thoughtworks.com.

Desired Experience

• Be a very hands-on tester who is comfortable across a whole range of functional testing including UAT, acceptance and system testing with tools like Fit, Fitnesse, Silk, Winrunner or any other automation tool
• Experience of participating in full life cycle development right from the requirements gathering and analysis phase
• Have worked on large, long term projects (more than 10 people, longer than 6 months)
• Enjoyment of working closely with developers, analysts and clients in a highly collaborative environment
• Exceptional communication skills
• An unrivalled passion for delivery

Also Highly Desirable

• Experience of creating test frameworks and strategy, choosing automated testing tools and creating testing standards
• Experience of, or interest in working with Open Source testing tools like Selenium and Sahi
• A knowledge of testing within an Agile development environment
• A background in OO development
• A track-record of innovation in testing
• Experience of working in an onsite, consultancy environment

So if you are interested, then click here to apply online. And just a quick reminder that ThoughtWorks offers Visa Sponsorship for candidates.

James Crisp and Richard Banks are organising the new ALT.NET group meeting in Sydney, the first one!
It is on Tuesday 30 September and ThoughtWorks is sponsoring with the office, pizza and beer.
The meetings will always occur on the last Tuesday of each month.
The agenda for the first one is:

• 6:00pm - Meet & Greet time and then Kick Off!
• 6:30pm - “Ruby, Rails and IronRuby from a .NET perspective” (James Crisp).
• 7:00pm - Break with food & drink
• 7:30pm - “Mocking with Rhino Mocks 3.5* (Richard Banks).
• 8:00pm - Wrap up & go home.

Address:
Level 8, 51 Pitt Street
Sydney NSW 2000
Australia

See you there!

This night we officially inaugurated our new office in Sydney, much more spacious, pretty much double size of the previous one and located on the CBD, close to the Circulay Quay. The thing that I most liked is that almost all the walls are made of white boards, so any spot is a place for discussion and notes. They continued adopting big tables where there are no fixed seats, allowing people on the beach to pair and develop things together. The kitchen is equipped with a fridge where you can get cold drinks, beers, wines, etc. and also has a huge LCD TV hooked into Wii console with lots of cool games! The party, as all the other ones, was plenty of food, drinks and interesting discussions. Kristan Vingrys presented some of the Twist features, the new functional testing platform developed by ThoughtWorks and Nick Carrol showed one of his Wii experiments, today, Mingle (projected on the wall) navigation using an infra-red pen. To see photos of the party, click here.

Next week (June 2-4) I’m gonna attend the JAOO Conference here in Sydney. ThoughtWorks is sponsoring the event and I’m very happy that they chose me to be one of the attendants. It’s quite exciting to have the opportunity to catch up with professionals that influenced me, such as Robert Martin, Rod Johnson, Martin Fowler, Jim Webber, Gregor Hohpe and also with Erik Dörnenburg who has been off the Sydney office for a while.

I will also be attending the Scrum Master training, which is an extension of the JAOO Conference. Martine Devos is going to run it and I’m really excited, because I wanted to attend it since I was in Brazil, and now I’m gonna be able to do it.

Will post updates of the Conference here soon!

Paul Hammant has just announced the PicoContainer 2.0 beta release. I’m particularly happy with the news, because I thought they had stopped to work on this project and I’ve always preferred this dependency injection container, its configuration is quite simple. So now it’s time to check it out!