Five for Friday – December 3, 2021

I’ve been meaning to write about this particular anti-pattern for a while now, as I think it contributes far too much to the lack of progress in advancing software testing. Up until five minutes ago, I called this the anti-silver bullet theory, in reference to Fred Brooks 1986 paper, No Silver Bullet as much as the…

First things first, I’m going to take the rest of the year off after today. Next week is a holiday, and then December is madness. I’ll do a few more posts in my other blog, and then hit the ground running in 2025. And that’s all for this week, and that’s all for 2025 while…

I’m leaving early tomorrow morning for the Writing About Testing conference. I wasn’t able to attend WAT last year, but I’m looking forward to the trip, the meeting and talking with a group of great testers (who all enjoy writing about what we do). I don’t think there was ever a point when I thought,…

I’ve been thinking about how professional testers describe themselves. We have high level labels like Tester, SDET, or Quality Engineer, but beyond those (mostly meaningless) titles, many of us have our own personal missions or visions – the words we want people to associate with us. For example, my twitter bio is, “Long time software…

I gave a short talk to an internal MS community this week. The topic of the day was “influence”, and I thought it was appropriate to talk about the value of building (and maintaining!) an informal network – and the impact of that network on influence. The advice to have an informal network isn’t new…

I’ve been thinking a lot less about testing activities lately, and much, much more on how we to make higher quality software in general. The theme is evident from my last several blog posts, but I’m still figuring out exactly what that means for me. What it boils down to, is a few principles that…