Five for Friday – April 12, 2024

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…

Every day, it seems, I come across an article, a forum posting, a blog, or a tweet bemoaning the end-of-test-as-we-know-it because some company has hired / is hiring people with programming knowledge to become testers. I’ve written about coding-testers (here, and in other posts) before (as have many others that I’m too lazy to look…

I took a ski day today – snow was soft, but held up pretty well until the afternoon. Here are a few things I read this week worth sharing. I’ve been reading a lot about feedback recently. Forbes had a good article this week on Flawless Feedback for Ferocious Teams This article hit a little…

I’m two months into my 18th year at Microsoft, and I still really enjoy it – most of the time at least. My job is great, I work on amazing technology, and with people smarter than you can imagine. But, for two months or so every year, the dreaded MS review monster comes out from…

For testers, being skeptical is generally a good thing. When someone says, “Our application doesn’t have any reliability errors”, I, for one, am skeptical. I’ll poke and prod and (usually) find something they haven’t thought about. There’s power in skepticism. Last year, I led a team of testers in performing code reviews of production code….

In a conversation last week at STAR, someone was talking about how far testers should debug an issue. Personally, I don’t like it when testers only report the surface of the bug, and I think good testers always dig a little deeper to see what other more interesting issues may be lurking a layer or…