ThoughtWorks Australia is Hiring!
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.
Sydney ALT.NET Meeting
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!
New ThoughtWorks Sydney office
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.
Notes from JAOO Sydney 2008
This Monday and Tuesday, as I mentioned in the previous post, I attended the JAOO Conference here in Sydney. The event was fantastic, I had the opportunity to meet some great developers that I previously knew from the web. ThoughtWorks had a stand there, where people could catch up during intervals and play some Wii! See photos here!
The first day:
Erik Meijer made a great talk on functional programming entitled "Why Functional Programming (Still) Matters", his advocation of this style of programming was interesting and funny at the same time. For him, any language that causes side-effects is not functional.
Rebecca Wirfs-Brock talked about "Lessons Learned from Architecture Reviews", explaining the real purpose of these reviews. The normal behavior in most projects is people coming up with an architecture made of trendy technologies as candidate to "address" an issue, just because people say it's nice. She claims that instead of doing this you should think about the outcomes that would result in the issue being addressed, evaluate if it can be achieved using the chosen architecture and if so, present it to the client. Pretty obvious but generally people don't put it into practice.
Martin Fowler talked about "Patterns Of Enterprise Application Architecture". It's impressive how, even when talking about a subject that is not new (for those who read the book), he can still come up with useful information through his insights. One example was the case of when to use Transactional Script and when to use Domain Model.
Martine Devos presented "Agile Coaching", she was also the Certified Scrum Master instructor in the training I attended. What I thought would be a valuable discussion about coaching and organizational transformation activities, type of work commonly requested by companies nowadays, turned out into an explanation of randomly selected agile concepts and practices. A wealth of information but a lack of conclusion!
Than I attended the "Enterprise Systems Panel", with Jim Webber, Patrick Linskey, Thilo Frotscher, Martin Fowler, Ben Alex (on the photo) and Dave Thomas (as the moderator). Lots of discussions on architectural issues such as transaction propagation, distributed architecture, etc.
The day finished with an awesome keynote of Erik Dörnenburg and Martin Fowler about Simplicity in Design.
The second day:
No comments required for Robert Martin! He's always inspired me and watching him was one of the main reasons that made me want to attend JAOO. He made two good-humored presentations about "Clean Code". If you don't know Uncle Bob, go and search for his books!
Steve Vinoski gave a great talk on "Building RESTful Services with Erlang and Yaws", definitely I left this presentation decided that Erlang is gonna be my language to learn in this year. It contains a feature called Pattern Matching that is quite interesting, probably I'm probably gonna post something about it in the near future. Regarding JAWS (Just Another Web Server), written in Erlang, for those implementing multi-threading systems considering the use of Apache as web server, one data: during a workbench, while JAWS was handling 80k concurrent connections, Apache died handling only 4k. I don't know you, but this is enough for me to have a look at it!
Gregor Hohpe talked about Google GData application. I don't know if I am the only one feeling it, but Google's presentations nowadays seems quite similar to those presented by Adobe, BEA etc, teaching how to use their products in order to make them richer!
Michael Feathers talked about "Working Effectively with Legacy Code", I've read part of his book and I found it quite useful. During the presentation he came up with some examples of really bad code (coupled, with no tests) and in real time, wrote unit tests, made it testable by refactoring to make them pass. Nice presentation, as well as being a cool man!
My friend Erik Dörnenburg closed the event talking about "Software Quality", showing the two perspectives of measuring software quality; the external one, if the software aggregates value to the customer, and the internal one, if it is easy to maintain, understand and extend, and if it was designed properly. He talked about tools to help you check code metrics, such as duplication, coverage and testability rate, among others, some with fancy graphics. He explained the purpose of these tools, why keep checking it? Code metrics helps you measuring tech debt and effectiveness of training (in a management role), and it guides you to spot code that needs refactoring/improvement.
For those interested, you can download some slides here.
JAOO Sydney 2008
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!