Brandon Holloway is a Quality Assurance Engineer at ThreeWill. He has over 10 years of QA experience in requirements gathering, risk analysis, project planning, project sizing, scheduling, testing, defect/bug tracking, management, and reporting.
Danny serves as Vice President of Client Development at ThreeWill. His primary responsibilities are to make sure that we are building partnerships with the right clients and getting out the message about how we can help clients.
Find this Podcast “Follow up from the 2017 ASTQB Summit with Brandon Holloway” on the ThreeWill Soundcloud, Stitcher, and iTunes.
Transcript
| Danny: | Hello and welcome to the Two Bald Brothers and a Microphone podcast. This is one of the bald brothers, Danny, and I am here with Brandon Holloway. Brandon, how are you doing?
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| Brandon: | I’m good. How are you?
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| Danny: | Good, good. I just want to catch up with you. You recently went to a conference. What was the name of the conference?
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| Brandon: | It was the ASTQB Summit and ASTQB stands for American Software Testing Qualifications Board.
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| Danny: | So you guys just geek out and sit around and test software the whole time you’re there?
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| Brandon: | Yes, something like that. I want to say they limited it to a hundred people and it was about that that showed up so I think they did maxed it out. Yeah, just a bunch of testers sitting around trying to find what’s wrong with everything, I guess, right?
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| Danny: | Excellent. Where was the conference? Where was the summit?
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| Brandon: | It was in Irvine, California.
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| Danny: | Have you ever been to Irvine?
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| Brandon: | No, this is my first time. Beautiful weather, I’ll tell you that.
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| Danny: | I heard you brought your beautiful wife with you as well.
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| Brandon: | I sure did. We made it a little extended vacation. I went to the conference on Friday and then we stayed a couple of nights in California and actually drove out to Vegas for a couple more nights.
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| Danny: | Nice. Did you have a good time?
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| Brandon: | We did. We did.
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| Danny: | Excellent. Excellent. How many days was the summit? Was it a couple of days? Was it a week?
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| Brandon: | Actually it was just one day. It was a full day from I guess like 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. or something like that. It was a full day.
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| Danny: | Then do they have a keynote to kick it off?
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| Brandon: | Yeah, there was a keynote speaker. Actually I forget the guy’s name but he’s the head of QA at I think Blizzard Entertainment which is video game, stuff like that. One of my previous jobs actually did gaming testing, different type of gaming. It was actually cool to hear about some of the stuff that they go through.
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| Danny: | Very nice. Very nice. I didn’t know that about you. You were testing a specific game?
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| Brandon: | Well, when I say gaming, this was actually like casino games is what I did. It was video slot machines, I guess. Blizzard Entertainment, that’s more of actual video games. It’s the same but not really.
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| Danny: | Do you use any of that testing knowledge about casino games when you’re in Las Vegas?
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| Brandon: | No, I did not. If anything, it helps me stay away from those slot machines because I know that you’re not going to win.
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| Danny: | You will not win.
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| Brandon: | You will not win unless you can rig them like we can, testing them which is not possible.
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| Danny: | Yes. They don’t like-
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| Brandon: | I’ve had many, many jackpots at work.
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| Danny: | That’s how you plan to retire?
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| Brandon: | Yeah, if I could find somebody that will cash those tickets, sure.
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| Danny: | Nice, nice. The sessions, you got a keynote and then were there specific sessions that you signed up for after that?
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| Brandon: | Yeah. They had three breakout sessions and basically you just got to choose which one you wanted to go to each time. I tried to find ones that, I guess, closely fit some of the things that I may do at ThreeWill. The first one was you had a choice between a breakout session mobile testing and then one of business analysis. I guess if anybody is also juggling being a [BA2 00:04:00] or just wanted to talk about requirements and things like that, they would go to that one. Of course I went to the mobile testing one because that is starting to be more and more required and necessary in testing nowadays so I thought that would be most helpful.
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| Danny: | Very nice. Any big takeaways or anything from a mobile … I guess is this one of the sessions that you’d already taken a test for?
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| Brandon: | Yes, actually I do have a certification through ASTQB for a certified mobile tester. A lot of it was the same content but it was … When I studied for these exams, I didn’t actually take a course. I would just study myself through online material. It was actually nice. Someone actually going through slides and explaining to us, like an expert in the field walking us through it. The main takeaway about mobile testing is this. Nowadays with the Internet of things and everything pretty much is a smart device and everybody wants to use their mobile phones to access applications and it’s really a big thing and an important part of testing nowadays. You don’t just jump online and do web testing on Internet Explorer anymore. It’s big.
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| Danny: | What other sessions were you able to go to?
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| Brandon: | I went to one on Agile testing. Basically, I deal with this everyday at ThreeWill and, I guess, they focused on Scrum and testing in that environment versus like a Waterfall type of environment. I was very familiar with all the terms that they were using and pretty much … Another one of my certifications is … There’s an extension on the foundational level certification that’s Agile testing so I had that one as well. A lot of this was a review for me as well but it’s always a good refresher to hear from the testing side of things, me being the only tester at ThreeWill. That was a good course to take.
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| Danny: | Nice. Any other takeaways from the day that you had from being out there?
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| Brandon: | Well, I guess my main takeaway, like I said, I knew a lot of the material being gone over but my main takeaway is like I just mentioned being the only tester at ThreeWill, it was really cool to be in this conference environment with a bunch of other testers.
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| Danny: | With fellow nerds like you.
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| Brandon: | I’m sorry?
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| Danny: | With fellow nerds like you.
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| Brandon: | Yeah.
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| Danny: | QA nerds like you. It’s nice.
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| Brandon: | Hello, hello perfectionist that look for every minor detail and critique everything. Exactly. It was just cool because … I don’t know. It validates my thinking on a lot of things. When sitting in these sessions and everything and everybody has the same thought process as me. I talked to a couple of different people and everything and it’s just nice being around a lot of testers to get that whole feel from everybody.
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| Danny: | I’ve experienced that same thing where I think I’m coming up with maybe an approach … A lot of the marketing stuff that I do, I go about it a certain way. Then sometimes you go to these conferences and just by hearing someone else say they took a similar approach, it does validate. I just makes you feel like, well, I am maybe doing. Maybe I’m doing something
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| Brandon: | Exactly because you’re not around other marketing people at ThreeWill everyday, I don’t think. This is like my situation. I’m not really around a lot of testers all the time so this was actually good getting out there and making sure I’m still on top of the game or whatever.
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| Danny: | Great. I appreciate you doing all these certifications. I think it’s great that you’re also taking advantage of getting this training and it’s a wonderful thing. I love having you on projects. You just do a great job for us. I really appreciate keeping your skills up to date and going to conferences like this and bringing that back to projects. You’re up to good stuff.
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| Brandon: | Well, I appreciate it and I think it’s important to keep up with certifications because a lot of these things like Agile testing … Before, I wasn’t doing Agile testing only with ThreeWill and mobile testing which is in recent years becoming bigger. I need to stay current with all testing methods and whatnot because, just like everything else, it’s evolving as well. I try my best to stay on top of it and get certified as many ways as I can.
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| Danny: | Excellent, excellent. Well, I appreciate you taking the time to do this and we’ll talk you maybe next quarter and thanks for all the hard work you put on projects and I appreciate it, Brandon.
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| Brandon: | All right. No problem. Thank you.
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| Danny: | Take care. Have a great day. Thank you everybody for listening and have a wonderful day. Take care. Bye-bye.
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