Beyond Certification Grows Global Community

I have to say, I’m pretty excited about the Beyond Certification network. In just a few short weeks there have been 90 people that have joined representing 11 different countries! That’s right. We currently have representation from:

1. US
2. Switzerland
3. Brazil
4. India
5. UK
6. Argentina
7. Canada
8. New Zealand
9. Germany
10. France
11. Israel

That’s a pretty healthy distribution for a group with 90 people. It’s wonderful to have such a diverse and global group!  One of the things I absolutely love about the Web is the power it provides to network with people from around the world.

Not only do we have global representation, as I’ve blogged about in the past, there are some big names on the site. I sent out an email to the group today, hinting at our first project. Take a look below and if you think this is a group you want to be a part of, I encourage you to sign up!

Update: Rob Lambert, another highly respected Software Testing Club founder just signed up! Yippee!

Message to Beyond Certification Network:

Happy New Year!

I’m very excited about Beyond Certification and wanted to welcome you all to this community. This group is meant to help IT Professionals gain professional development experience, particularly with Distributed Agile skills. An emphasis is on Software Quality Assurance, though we need professionals who are interested in all aspects of the development cycle.

Membership

Currently we have 90 members representing 11 different countries. Experience with Agile varies from those who are brand new to Agile, to expert, Lisa Crispin, co-author of Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams.  We have other members who are experts and writers and trainers in the field of Software Quality Assurance including notables, Michael Bolton and Matthew Heusser. We have two founding members from The Weekend Testing group, Ajay Balamurugadas and Parimala Shankaraiah.  The Weekend Testing group is a professional development group that holds Weekend Challenges in Exploratory Testing, and sparked the inspiration for this group. We have several members from The Software Testing Club here, an excellent network for Software Testers, including founding members Rosie Sherry and Phil Kirkham. We have Joel Montvelisky,  another prominent member of the Software Testing Club, who is willing to let us use the PractiTest software product for our project management and bug tracking needs.

There are other names that I recognize and respect as well as many names that are new to me. My hope is that as we learn and apply our knowledge via distributed agile projects, we will not only gain skills, but open up more employment opportunities for those who are interested in telecommuting. I’m so honored to be a part of a group that is interested in learning and sharing knowledge.

Now let’s get started!

Exploratory Test Repository Project

After attending a Webinar about Exploratory Testing, hosted by uTest and presented by James Whittaker, I got the idea that creating an Open Source Exploratory Test Repository might be a great project for this team. I have a meeting set for January 6th to talk to James Whittaker about this further. Once I have a better idea of what the requirements, skills, and time commitment for this project might be, I will be recruiting amongst you. I suspect we will begin the project in February.

Goals for January

1) Meet with James Whittaker from Google to discuss Beyond Certification and the possibility of Exploratory Test Repository Project.
2) Share and promote resources aimed at helping the group learn more about Agile Development.
3) Improve the Beyond Certification site, adding more information and promoting active sharing.
4) Learn PractiTest and prepare to use it for our first project.
5) Outline requirements and recruit Agile Team for our first project.

What You Can Do

1) Participate! Fill out your profile, introduce yourself, use the Forums to start discussions. Ask questions.
2) Recruit others. The more people and participation we have, the more likely we are to be a successful group.
3) Learn more about Distributed Agile and share your learnings. What books, tools, resources, etc. have you found to be useful? Let others know. Start groups around topics for studying, learning, or discussion.
4) If you think you might be interested in participating in the Exploratory Test Repository Project, let me know. I will be starting a group and keeping you posted with updates and resources to get us started.
5) Have fun!