Five for Friday – January 8, 2021

Clearing out some random news and thoughts. None of them worth a post, but worth sharing…probably. A few days ago, I reposted the Microsoft SDET personas I originally wrote (5? years ago) for the MSDN tester center. They could use a bit of updating, but they hold the test of time fairly well (link here)….

Despite the lame title, this isn’t yet another post attempting to describe what testing is – it’s just something I wanted to share inspired by a small discussion last night (although if you browse the testing blogosphere, you’ll find a lot of good discussion on this topic lately). I went to Seth Eliot’s talk at…

I’m in Hyderabad, India this week to meet with some of our team and to give a handful of presentations at an internal conference. The weather is wonderful this week – it’s warm during the day and cool at night. I got to the hotel around 2:00am Tuesday morning, but got a few hours of…

Note: no direct information on software testing or software engineering is in this post. This is purely a trip report (that happens to be related to a trip I took to talk about testing). As I begin writing this, I’m in the middle of a trip to New Zealand and Australia. The main purpose of…

Anyone who reads this blog has probably also read about, or heard of the recent policy from Marissa Mayer at Yahoo recalling home-office based employees back to the office (Bing search here in case you’ve been under a rock). Most of the reactions I’ve seen to this policy are correctly identifying this as a management…

When I was 9 years old, I’d play pick up soccer at recess. A couple of kids – the “leaders” would pick teams, and then we’d play. Since we were kids, the leaders of the teams were sometimes the best players, but usually the loudest kids. Leadership was short-lived, but effective for the purpose. I…