Five for Friday – January 25, 2019

Greetings from the wrong side of the country. I’m in the middle of a quick family trip and it seemed like a perfect time to let you know what’s been filling my brain this week. Free can’t last forever – Heroku is discontinuing their free plans – which is a bit of a bummer, but…

In early January, I’ll hit my 19 year anniversary of working at Microsoft (I’ve worked for Microsoft 18.5 years, and as a vendor at Microsoft for the first 5 months or so). There’s been a lot of change over the years, but perhaps never as much as is going on right now. We’re getting a…

I read Outcomes over Output on a plane ride to the bay area yesterday. It’s a quick read, and full of great information and reminders on delivering customer outcomes and behavior changes (which ultimately result in business and customer value). I also just read Radical Focus – it’s a book (a business novel) about effective…

Last week I happened to log on to twitter just as some test folks were marveling over the the massive parallels between the video with the gorilla and the basketball players and software testing. I made some cracks about the absurdity of the hype, and more than a few testers freaked out. Somewhere in the…

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…

A few days ago, I began a verbal exploration of testers who code and coders who test. That post provides some context for today’s continuation, so if you have a moment, go ahead and check it out. OK – I know you didn’t read it (or you read it already), so I’ll give you the…