Five for Friday – February 19, 2021

A little over five weeks ago, I got a new job (one of the things I find great about MS is that one can change jobs completely without going through the hassle of filling out new forms). In that five weeks, I was in Germany for four days, and off for two days for Thanksgiving,…

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…

I’m a Senior Tester, don’t you know Been testing software for five years or so I got bills to pay and need a better job… Looking for jobs with ‘Senior’ in the name Gotta’s admit, they’re all pretty lame Looks like I’m over-qualified… Someone (non-Microsoft) asked me recently what a “Senior Tester” does. I told…

The cat’s out of the bag – I’m popping out of my no-conference bubble, and making an appearance at a testing conference (STAR West in October). The theme of the conference is “Be a Testing Rock star”, and while I think that theme begs for an appearance from Michael Larsen, I’ll do my best to…

Jerry Weinberg passed away earlier this week, and I’ve taken some time to re-read parts of many of his books, where I’ve been constantly reminded of his leadership knowledge. I grabbed this quote from Becoming a Technical Leader to share“People don’t become leaders because they never fail. They become leaders because of the way they respond…

My last post dove into the world of engineering teams / combined engineering / fancy-name-of-the-moment where there are no separate disciplines for development and test. I think there are advantages to one-team engineering, but that doesn’t mean that your team needs to change. First things First I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s worth saying again….