Five for Friday – October 13, 2023

Travel week, so I spent a bit less time on the internet, but still have a few things to share.

  • On a flight on Monday, I just about finished The Right Kind of Wrong by Amy Edmondson. I adore The Fearless Organization, and this book builds on that and talks extensively about the types of mistakes we make and how we learn from those different experiences. It reminds me of Human Error by James Reason – but a much better read.
  • It’s been a long minute since I lined to a Jeff Nyman post, but his article on What Actually Is Testing? is excellent, and a must read for anyone making software (certainly not just dedicated testers)
  • And speaking of people I haven’t linked to in a long time, Keith Stobie just (or within the last few weeks) wrote about Testing LLM Generate Code – which is something I’m really concerned about. I think there is a rising amount of code being written and pushed to production that isn’t fully understood. That should be at least a little scary.
  • I gripe a lot about Scrum, because teams too often get lost in the rituals over actually delivering incrementally and adaptively. One big gripe are standups, so was ecstatic to see Mike Cohn write about making standups better – .Daily Scrums Not Working? Try This Instead.
  • I usually try to avoid Medium, but recently discovered the posts of Sebastian Carlos. His latest, How Upgrading Node Broke My Build but Saved My Marriage is fantastic.

Thanks again for reading – have a great weekend.

Similar Posts

  • Q&A about software testing

    If you want to skip the preamble and get to the point, just page down to the end of this post. The professional software testing community has a good support network of web sites dedicated (or partially dedicated) to answering questions about testing. Some of my favorites are: MSDN Testing Forums  SQA Forums Software Testing…

  • <sigh> Automation…again

    I think this is the first time I’ve blogged about automation since writing…or, to be fair, compiling The A Word. But yet again, I see questions among testers about the value of automation and whether it will replace testers, etc.. For example, this post from Josh Grant asks whether there are similarities between automated trucking…

  • Roles and Fluidity

    I had a twitter conversation this week about roles this week. I’ll recap it – and expand on my views; but first I’ll tell a story. Very early on in the Windows 98 project, I was performing some exploratory testing on the explorer shell and found an interesting (and slightly weird bug). At the end…

  • Finding Quality

    Leave it to Adam Goucher to beat me to the punch line. When I proposed that breaking down your definition of quality to a manageable set of ilities is a reasonable method for improving customer perceived quality, the logical next step is to try and find out which of the ilities you need to care…

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.