Category Archives: All Posts

I frequently go days at work without writing code. On many days, I do “typical” test activities (seeing what works, what doesn’t work, etc.) Some days I’m debugging all day. Other days, I’m sifting through the perl and batch scripts that bolt our build process together. On other days, I’m managing projects, tweaking excel, or [...]

The cat’s out of the bag – I’m popping out of my no-conference bubble, and making an appearance at a testing conference (STAR West in October). The theme of the conference is “Be a Testing Rock star”, and while I think that theme begs for an appearance from Michael Larsen, I’ll do my best to [...]

I chair an advisory council for a community of senior testers at Microsoft. We have a variety of events ranging from talking heads to open space events to panels to whatever type of event we think is the most different than the previous one. Yesterday, we had our fifth annual “soapbox” event, a lightning talk-ish [...]

It’s interesting when I go back and look at the number of posts where I talk about what I do, what testing is to me, and how testing is changing. Ever since the Telerik Test Summit (telsum), I’ve been thinking even more about testing and how it fits into software development. When I wrote this [...]

A few days ago, I began a verbal exploration of testers who code and coders who test. That post provides some context for today’s continuation, so if you have a moment, go ahead and check it out. OK – I know you didn’t read it (or you read it already), so I’ll give you the [...]

For the last day or so, I’ve been thinking a lot about programming and testing, about collaboration and walls, and about where this may all be going. This post is the start of my mental exploration of the subject. In the beginning… In How We Test Software at Microsoft, we told the story of Microsoft [...]

I haven’t blogged much recently, and it’s mainly for three reasons. I’m busy – probably the hardest I’ve worked in all of my time in software. And although there have been a few late nights, the busy isn’t coming from 80-100 hour weeks, it’s coming from 50 hour weeks of working on really hard shit. [...]

Yesterday, I read a mail sent to an email alias I’m on, where the author was asking why tool X wasn’t enabled on his latest build. The mail looked something like this (genericized to protect the innocent). foo.service doesn’t appear to be working Repro: I installed the build from <build_path> I verified the binaries existed [...]

Last summer, I posted a short rant on multitasking. If you don’t want to read, it was my normal type of rant where I complain about people taking an already generalized statement and apply it even more widely. This week, in response to that post (some responses take longer than others), I received a pointer [...]

Like most Microsoft employees, I have a whiteboard in my office, and mine (also like most) gets used a lot for notes, explanations, architecture, or whatever. This is nothing new – it’s part of the software culture. A few years ago, I recorded a few handfuls of these talks (some slightly staged) with some all-star [...]