Career Paths for Testers Using Personas

Inspiration for my blog posts often comes from whatever’s evoking emotion in my life (annoyances, victories, gripes, etc.). Three things happened today that ensured that I’d write this post. Here’s the story of a question from a seven year old, a phone call, and an email. The first incident was a common one. My son…

Here’s a story I hear often. The names have been changed to prevent the guilty. Jake had barely taken a sip of his steaming coffee when he saw that thirty-two of the automated tests failed in last night’s test pass. “Crap, I’m slammed today”, thought Jake, “I don’t have time to look at thirty-blanking-two failures”….

It’s FfF time again I think (hope) everyone knows that this blog series is based entirely on Tim Ferris’s Five Bullet Friday posts. I listen to some of Tim’s podcasts – and his recent interview with Eric Schmidt is fantastic. If you don’t like podcasts, there’s a transcript here. I’ve been thinking about interviewing and…

Go. Get. Vaccinated. For the rest of you, be sure to flash your vaccination card at your screen before reading about some of the interesting articles I found this week. Like many others, I’m sad, mad, frustrated, and (unfortunately) not that surprised to hear all of the stories about toxic environments at Activision / Blizzard….

I recently re-read (skimmed) Steve McConnell’s Software Estimation, Demystifying the Black Art. When I met with Microsoft Press to pitch HWTSAM, they gave a hot-off-the press new copy, and while some of the book feels “old school”, it’s still filled with foundational estimation knowledge. I work at home, and absolutely need a quiet PC –…

(part 1 is here) (part 2 is here) (part 3 is here) (part 4 is here) I’ve been in the Engineering Excellence (EE) team at Microsoft for nearly five years now, and the time has flown by. The job is completely different from a typical test role, yet almost all I talk about is testing….