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Element-L: A letter to anyone new to working with me
Element (noun):a part or aspect of something abstract, especially one that is essential or characteristic. Hi, It’s me, L, Lanessa, I hope this helps you get to know me better sooner. I am happy to work with you. If you are new to my team, know that I want you to feel like you can…
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Bring in the Concrete Truck
Help me understand you. Be specific. When I was a kid, my mom, dad, brother, and I drove rebar into sandy red Alabama clay soil and secured horizontal boards running 12 inches or so below the surface of the ground to create a form for what would become the foundation of a large metal barn. …
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Fight Test Results
To foster a healthy team culture in which people are safe to be themselves, create, do meaningful work, and thrive. That’s what matters most to me. I felt ill-equipped in the past when in toxic or even mildly tense situations. I didn’t see these as invitations, calls to personal action. I went silent or into…
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Improvisation: for your Team and Life
It takes strength to stay open It is easy to create lines for yourself, to box yourself into a corner, to let habits, concave thoughts, patterns, and conditioning keep you rolling along responding to perceived threats or obstacles in a myopic manner. Remember your own brilliance. Assume the best in others. Seek to create new…
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About that Transition
Inevitably interviewers ask me, How and why did that happen? – career track shift from environmental science to software development. This question and related blog post by Eric Jacobsen, You’re a Tester. How’d that Happen? are fodder for this introspection and retrospection. The Why: I wanted to be in perpetual state of intellectual challenges, where interpersonal…
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WFH: Month 11 Reflections
I am frequently asked, So how do you like working from home (WFH)? My response is, Even more than I anticipated. I have been reflecting on this quite a bit lately. JIGSAW FALLING INTO PLACE How this started. Last August I left an amazing company and a role in which I was generally content, where…
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Yes, You Have Something to Share
In 2013, I was just beginning to assimilate the lessons – the failures and the successes – from the challenges of my 1st four years building a test team from 1 (me) to 5 and being in a manager role while providing testing services across multiple projects. A friend who’d just returned from a developer conference in…
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August and Everything After
Attribution Note: This post’s title belongs to the Counting Crows album released in 1993. *Please see below. One of my software testing community colleagues emailed me this week, “You’ve been quiet. How are things?” I went into something akin to recluse mode after an amazing week in New York City in August 2014 where I participated…
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Test Across the Bay! Meetup in Mobile, AL
Thank you to CTS Mobile sponsoring and hosting this month’s Lean Coffee Style Meetup in their Wall Street office. It was great to have both testers and developers at the table forming our own agenda, sharing insights, experiences, laughs, and food. Everyone took 2 index cards and wrote down a topic of interest. Next we…
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Mitch’s Testing Kata
Thanks to Mitch Ferrer, Application Architect with AppRiver, LLC, for hosting the Gulf Coast Software Testing June Meetup and to our friends at the Gulf Coast Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship for providing meeting space for 10 Test Enthusiasts. Why kata? -for the sake of practice and growth. Test drive a language, test drive a…
TestNess
… Lanessa's musings on tenacity & discovery in software engineering
TestNess 