Maaret Pyhäjärvi

🇫🇮Tester of products and organizations. Interim and fractional leadership. Exploratory tester, (Polyglot) Programmer, Speaker, Author. Taking software development seriously. She/Her. maaret@iki.fi

Web: https://maaretp.com
Blog: https://visible-quality.blogspot.fi
Talks turned articles: https://dev.to/maaretp/
Blog: https://medium.com/@maaretp

Last Notes

2026-01-06 08:37:58 UTC

- reply

a lot of our courses have these silly multi choice questions. It feels so low bar to hold people’s heads because they can’t make their own choices on how and wha to learn.

2026-01-05 18:59:21 UTC

5 people reported 2 hours into taking a 2-hour training. I asked all five for 1-3 things they learned. Silence.
I asked again one-on-one. The first one said they were actually multitasking because the training was kind of boring. But they still considered they did the training with those hours, not the real focus they ended up with.
Second one said they need to watch the videos again, because they realized on my question that they did not manage to hold anything.

2025-11-25 05:36:07 UTC

- reply

It's called "work I want to learn to opt out of". :D

2025-11-25 04:42:21 UTC

The amount of unpaid work clients put me through. I’m thinking of possibilities to go with ‘no’ on all bid competitions that require more than sharing the price for the customer defined service.
Jumping through so many unpaid hoops to essentially find myself consulting on what they may want with whatever they asked.

2025-10-10 09:09:50 UTC

I hate ‘self-taught’. You’re not self-taught, you’re community taught. Self-taught is erasing all the work that allowed you to learn from freely available materials and people.
It’s a poor phrase for the idea that you are degreeless. And there’s nothing wrong with skipping formal education.

2025-10-04 08:27:16 UTC

Unit price for software is not price of an hour. It varies all too much what value an hour gives you. It’s not lines of code either.
I don’t really know what a unit would be. And yet there’s a minister wanting to make unit prices public.

2024-09-06 17:38:50 UTC

Old days we did this. I had the box as tested the version. Moomin edition, real collectors item. Reminded of this by my son doing homework write up on F-Secure.
https://media.mas.to/media_attachments/files/113/091/824/442/650/171/original/ea57dc062a3b244b.jpeg

2024-09-05 11:55:07 UTC

- reply

I don't even know which bank, this was really something overheard. And shocking.
I find it somewhat weird that my peers (testers) tend to argue for needing testers when we see these. I would argue for unsafe cultures and weird silos pushing foolishness.

2024-09-05 10:44:57 UTC

Oh: 'Who the fuck thought it was a good idea to have a popup window saying “Would you like to report another death?” after you close the bank account of your recently deceased parent?'
But also, this is not why we need testers. Anyone could speak up with this. This is why we need people to care and not follow designs blindly.