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Yes – it’s more of Brent and Alan yelling at each other. But this time, Brent says that he, “hates the Agile Manifesto”. I also talk about my trip to Florida, and we discuss estimation and planning and a bunch of other stuff. Subscribe to the ABTesting Podcast! Subscribe via RSS Subscribe via iTunes

The day job (and a new podcast) have been getting the bulk of my time lately, but I’m way overdue to talk about data and quadrants. If you need a bit of context or refresher on my stance, this post talks about my take on Brian Marick’s quadrants (used famously by Gregory and Crispin in…

Brent and I gabbed about testing again last week – or sort of…We mostly talked about change management, and why people avoid or embrace change. We’ll probably settle back to a once every two weeks posting after this – or some sort of regular, sustainable cadence. Subscribe to the ABTesting Podcast! Subscribe via RSS Subscribe…

Brent Jensen and I found some time together recently to talk about testing. For some reason, we decided to record it. Worse yet, we decided to share it! I suppose we’ll keep this up until we either run out of things to say (unlikely), or until the internet tells us to shut up (much more…

As you may have noticed, my blogging has slowed. I’ve been navigating and ramping up on a new team and helping the team shift roles (all fun stuff). I’ve also been figuring out how to work in a big org (our team is “small”, but it’s part of one of Microsoft’s “huge” orgs – and…

I’ve been thinking a lot less about testing activities lately, and much, much more on how we to make higher quality software in general. The theme is evident from my last several blog posts, but I’m still figuring out exactly what that means for me. What it boils down to, is a few principles that…

In 2003, Brian Marick introduced the concept of “Agile Quadrants” to describe the scope of testing[1] (later expanded on by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory[2]). Several people (including me) have expanded and elaborated on the quadrants to describe the scope and activities of testing. Here’s a version of the testing quadrants. One challenge I’ve seen…

No testing related content in this post – just a quick trip report of our family vacation to Australia that I can point people to as necessary. Sydney (part 1) After a long flight, we landed in Sydney, where we immediately set out to explore a bit (I’ve found that walking in the sun is…

I’m back at the job after a long break (including a month vacationing in Australia – trip report coming). I spent a chunk of time after the Xbox One ship figuring out what the next step in my software career was going to be. In the days up to the Xbox One launch, I hinted…

I’m on vacation, and this post is auto-generated. See, you can trust automation sometimes… Another year gone by, and another few dozen posts. Here are the top viewed posts of the last year (note – not all of these were written last year – this is just what people read the most last year). In…

I’m heading off for a long vacation today, so this is likely my last post of the year. It’s been a crazy year, and I thought I’d end it with something that a lot of my recent posts have been leading to (e.g. this post on tearing down the walls). Some of you will hate…

Five years ago this week, How We Test Software at Microsoft hit the shelves. The book has done well – both in sales, and in telling the story of how Microsoft approaches software testing. An unfortunate aspect of writing a book like this is that after five years, most of the book is obsolete. Sure,…

I intended for my last two posts to cover the main points of my STAR West keynote, but I neglected to mention a few of the books I referenced in my talk (which not coincidentally, are some of my most recommended books for those studying leadership. I first read Leadership on the Line as part…

In my last post, I wrote a bit about what it takes to build a great team, and how it takes a great team to build great software (which also covers about half of what I spoke about at STAR West in October). In this post, I’ll see if I can cover the other main…

I picked up my Xbox One this morning – a special white console with “I made this!” engraved on it. The reviews started appearing last night, and for the post part, they’re quite positive (and I’m not surprised by the drawbacks listed in the reviews I’ve read so far). Now that this project is officially…

I first heard of “10x” software development through the writings of Steve McConnell. Code Complete remains one of my favorite books about writing good software (The Pragmatic Programmer, Writing Solid Code, and The Clean Coder are also on that list). Steve McConnell’s rarely updated blog (titled 10x Software Development, contains the following tagline: Numerous studies…

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 forgot to mention this before, but on Thursday, Jason Arbon from applause and uTest will be giving a practically free ($99) course on mobile application quality. Jason is a great teacher, and really knows his stuff in this area. More information at the SASQAG web site (scroll down a bit on the home page)

I implied at the end of my last post that I’d follow up after my keynote (I failed – sorry). This was a weird conference for me. While I attended nearly all of the keynotes, I only made it to a few other sessions, and didn’t have as much time to hang out with folks…