5 Questions For Adam Goucher

Adam Goucher was kind enough to answer 5 questions about himself and his Quality through Innovation blog.
Adam is also working on a Beautiful Testing book

1. Why did you start blogging and what were you hoping to get out of it ?
( and have you got what you hoped for ? )

The thing that struck me most when I met James Bach while taking his Rapid Software Testing course was how well thought out his arguments for things are. I figured if I was going to really pursue this testing thing professionally I too needed to develop my opinions, and writing them down seemed a good way to do that.

In addition to still using it as a platform for new or half-baked ideas, I also use it as a form of online memory where I'll post summaries of articles and such that I might find useful sometime later. I hope those are useful to others as well.

2. What have you learned from doing your blog ?

I've learned a lot about the opinions that I thought I had or didn't realize that I had. It's interesting as well to see how my thoughts have evolved over the last 3 years.

3. Do you track your visitors - if so, any unusual searches to find your blog ?

I track the number of RSS subscribers, but I don't measure the 'success' of the blog based on the raw numbers. I blog primarily for myself, but of course, it is nice to see the number of readers graph slowly ticking upwards.

As for interesting stuff reveal by having metrics, I would have to say that it was the couple months where 'How to build a light saber' was the top search that was coming into the site. I had coined the Build your own light saber heuristic about the preference I have to building my own custom tool rather than pay for another one that you don't fully control which had apparently achieved a fairly high Google rank.

4. Do you have a favourite post that you have written ?

I'm not sure that I have a particularly favourite post. Every one I write had a reason for existing, even if it was only for a few minutes. As my ideas and opinions evolve on testing, some posts become less favoured but even those still serve their purpose as a reminder of where I was at that point in time.

That said, if you measure favouritism based on how often I mention a post to someone, then it would be a tie between these two posts
- SLIME
- LOUD (and to a lesser extent this which is related)

5. Any advice to new bloggers ?

- Start now
- Write often
- Write for yourself
- Don't worry about polish. Polish will come in time, just get the ideas out there
- Write often
- Be honest in your writing
- Be yourself
- Write often
- Don't worry about monetizing your blog; the intangible benefits outweigh the direct fiscal ones