Five for Friday – April 12, 2019

Phil Kirkham confirmed his birthright as a tester by asking the epitomical tester question regarding my last post. Why? To be fair, he actually asked: quite a schedule – so what do you get out of it ? Or conversely, if you didn’t go to these events what do you think you would be missing…

It’s been a weird week as I see more and more unmasked people milling about, but while still unnerving, it’s nice to see and end approaching. Here are some covid-free articles I found that seem interesting. I’ve been hearing a lot about Product Ops recently and then I found this article which provides (I think)…

I was thinking about this on the way to work today, and thought I’d try to spit out a quick blog post before I got side-tracked again. I’ve been very fortunate to have had success with organizational change with teams at Microsoft. Whether it’s getting programmers to run integration tests before check-in, or helping a…

In music, the better you are at the basics, the better you are on the bandstand. Even the pro musicians I know practice almost every day. I think testers (and developers) forget the value of practice too often. In The Passionate Programmer, Chad Fowler suggests doing the exercises on CodeKata. I checked them out, and…

Chris Mcmahon once (I think after reading this post) described me and my test role at MS as being like a “tenured professor” – that I have the freedom to choose what I do and choose how I go about it (as long as I show value). I enjoy this role, and think I’ve been…

Wow – where did that week go? Here are few things I found worth pondering this week. There will be a full blog post with details, but I had one too many pieces of hardware fail after an ill-timed Windows update, and a few too many settings changes after the same, and I flipped out…