Five for Friday – Friday, September 28

The wikipedia entry on test automation troubles me. It says: Commonly, test automation involves automating a manual process already in place that uses a formalized testing process. I can’t decide whether it bothers me because it’s wrong, or because so many people believe the statement is true. In fact, I know the approach in some…

Last week, I posted a small testing challenge (in short, an application wouldn’t launch).Shmuel Gershon has a wonderful write up of how he found the problem here. For those too lazy to read, the problem was that the application attempted to read a reg key on launch, and failed to launch (with no diagnostics) if…

I’d like to elaborate on something from a previous post on SDETs at Microsoft. One thing that is perhaps a bit different about the test role at Microsoft is its tie to the career path. We are, for better or worse, big believers in career growth and expect growth in scope and impact from all…

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…

When I meet new people, they often ask, “what do you do?” The answer I give initially, and the one I hope to get away with is, “I work at Microsoft.” It rarely works. They inevitably follow up with, “what do you do there?” – which, for better or for worse is a much more…

We are officially in the end game of 2023, but the internet continues to supply me with interesting things to read. And now I’ve counted to five one more time, so it’s time to hit publish (or in this case, schedule the publish) and get on with my day.