Winner at EuroSTAR Dragon drawing competition and a book extract

Yesterday I had good fun speaking at EuroSTAR 2020 online conference. My session of Encouraging Children into Testing was a great success. You can see the slides here. The EuroSTAR conference is always an amazing speaking experience. This was my third time to give a presentation at EuroSTAR, but for me the best one, because the topic was so close to my heart. Also, it was interesting to work with the crew to make the presentation happen online.

I gave the participants a task of writing down some details of an interesting bug they had encountered and then drawing a dragon in its likeness. This same exercise appears in my Dragons Out book. The participants emailed me some very interesting dragons. Some were easy to spot, some hard to spot. Some were treated as a feature of the software, some would appear at a worst possible moment in an unusual environment, some defects were in the hardware, some in the software. Really great imagination, people! I promised to have a draw of a book prize among those who sent me a dragon picture. The lucky winner of the draw is Székely Zoltán! Congrats! I'll contact him for his address for the delivery of the copy of the English version of the Dragons Out book.

Here is Zoltán's dragon (actually two), by his permission.



The book extract of this blog deals with a hardware defect like one of the participant drawings:

On the way to Mountain City, Swanlake told Laura and Tom everything she knew about Mountain City’s problem. One day in the castle cellar, a chef's assistant had encountered a large dragon. The assistant had come to fetch a big smoked ham for dinner. He was terrified but unhurt after the dragon was more interested in the meat it was eating.

In the story, the castle and the city are bothered by a dragon that emerges from the hill on which the castle is built. In the world of information technology, the hill represents the computers and components of the bank information system. Not all strange things or defects are software related. Some parts of the computer may fail when used excessively or when connected to an increasingly large information system.


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