Although I never was a fan of new year’s resolutions, I decided to make a list of things I would like to accomplish in 2018. This was triggered by this forum-thread on the Ministry of Testing platform. I decided to make my list a bit broader then testing-only. I’ve come to this list of goals:

More involvement in my craft

I’ve never been a fan of writing about my craft, mostly because I was always afraid to ‘fail’. To get negative feedback on my input. But you should fail to learn, so that argument is no longer valid for me. Therefor, I intend to share more of my own story/stories in my testing career at both the Ministry of Testing platform as well as this blog.

Apart from the online involvement, I think it is wise to be more involved through local meetups. Maybe look into membership of Testnet (or something similar) and visit some meetups this year.

I still feel like I lack some testing-basics. More experience will probably fix that in the long run, but to get more of a kick-start in this regard, I also want to look into basic certifications like ISTQB Foundations or TMap. Also, I intend to dive into some books, like ‘Agile Testing’ that I bought recently.

At work

As I’m still trying to find my way as a tester, my goals for work are mostly related to my personal testing skills.

• Try to do more exploratory testing (actually have a set goal within a timebox and try to dive deep)
• Bring more organisation in my weekly schedule (less chaos, less reactivity)
• Automate more of my tasks, and tests (for instance: automate creation of testreports)
• Write Protractor tests for at least one of our team’s applications

Keep sporting

In 2017 I upped my running-game by doing the the Singelloop in Utrecht (10km) and the Dam tot Dam-loop in Amsterdam. The last one was a 16km run and I was able to run it in an astounding time of 1:35:10. For me, this was a victory. It also was an eye-opener; if I can run the 16km I just might also be able to run a half marathon (21km). This led me to the following running goals for 2018:

• Keep up with the 1-mile-a-day challenge during 2018 (running 1 mile a day on average)
• Run a quarter marathon
• Run a half marathon (and no, I will never do a whole marathon)

Two years back I was on a holiday and played a game of tennis with my parents and brother. I hadn’t done that for years; I stopped playing tennis years ago when I moved out and started studying. This one game of tennis on a heated hardcore lawn on Lanzarote triggered me to rethink my stance on tennis. Shortly after I decided to get back into it, but the club I wanted to get into had a member-stop. Now, 1,5 years later, I am on the top of the waiting-list and can join in from april 2018. So, in april I want to start playing tennis again.

So, that’s about it. Let’s see what I will accomplish this coming year!

To conclude: happy new year!