As with many other roles and departments, working with HR is not a one-man (or woman) show. Working with employees, their well-being, their commitment,and their performance is something that needs to, of course, be driven by respective roles but it also needs to be nurtured by the employees themselves. 

The spring competition for this year has come to a close, and what an eventful month it has been! It marks the third year in a row that our company has organized this event internally. With an environmental theme at its core, participants had the opportunity to earn additional points by engaging in tasks that benefit the environment.

Every once in a while we host and share games and events for our QA network to attend for challenging themselves within our field. Two of those challenges are Solve a problem and Bug hunter. Sometimes we host them during specific events to take part in IRL at a job fair for example, and sometimes we host them on our website and social media. 
To make the most fun and challenging activities to share with you, we have to use highly creative and skilled people (and we have lots of those people in our company).
So let us introduce two of the brains behind some of the challenges - Mille and Selma! 

As many of you already know, System Verification is not only a kick-ass niched QA company but also a company filled with caring individuals with the need and wish to help others. 

During the year, with different kinds of initiatives, we gave our take topositively contribute to a better society, whether through a competition, where our winning employees got the opportunity to choose an organization to support with the prize money, simply raising money for a joint purpose, or something completely different. What matters the most is that this way of living, the need of supporting others among us is a part of us all, and we are very proud of what we can achieve together.

During the 19th and 20th of October, our global HR team visited the HRCoreAcademy Summit, live in Amsterdam! An HR conference with HR leaders participating from different countries and companies with a common focus on the topics of Learning & Development and Talent Transformation.

Last year we took part in this conference as well, however, due to the pandemic, it was held digitally. We were therefore really excited to be part of it live this year and get the chance to meet and connect with other HR professionals to share inspiration, challenges and learnings. Even though company sizes and branches might differ a lot, still, the topics and insights you get from each other are of great value. It gave us ideas on how to improve and do differently in some areas but also a confirmation that we do a really good job in several areas already.

Performance Testing is a software testing process used to evaluate a software application's speed, response time, stability, reliability, scalability, and resource usage under the expected workload. 

Performance tests are typically executed to examine speed, robustness, reliability, and application size. Performance testing goals include evaluating application output, processing speed, data transfer velocity, network bandwidth usage, maximum concurrent users, memory utilization, workload efficiency, and command response times. 

Shortly, the goal of Performance Testing is not to find bugs but to eliminate performance bottlenecks. 

I have said it before and I hate to say it again, but I have been working for 25 years in the software industry, but I have seen fairly small improvements over the years. It has been said that it is a young discipline and therefore it is prone to failure, and everyone needs to learn from their mistakes. Over the years a number of different methods, tools, processes, etc. have been presented to help us improve but still I hear more stories about projects that have quality problems and run over budget and time, compared to projects that succeed to meet their initial frames.

I have worked in the software QA business for more than 20 years, helping clients with software testing and test management primarily. Something that I find interesting is when I can see connections between the IT business and other industries. Today I would like to discuss one of these topics. It’s one that came to mind in the light of a notable medical scandal.

The Tale of The Castle at the Shores of Lake Vättern.

One morning in early August 2021, in the midst of the Corona pandemic, two noble, hopeful and somewhat nervous QA knights met in a parking lot outside a furniture store in Jönköping. They arrived in their graceful gray steeds (also known as “cars”). One of the steeds was a rental vehicle, with a dubious smell from the carpets. The other steed simply reeked of horses. But that did not stop the two knights from embarking upon their new adventure.

I live with my family on a horse farm 150 kilometers from my workplace.