Between Netflix, Amazon Prime, and a busy schedule, I’ve gone without cable television for the last five or so years…up until a month or so ago when I bit the bullet (for a variety of reasons), and added a television package to our existing internet service. It’s working great so far, but the story about…
I chuckle a bit every time I see a tweet or a blog post talking about how some attribute is uniquely important for anyone wanting to be successful in a software role – when in reality, there are many professions where these attributes help lead to success. I’m not saying the attributes aren’t important, but…
While cleaning out some boxes my Mom had packed away, I came across a yearbook from my freshmen year of high school. I hated my freshmen photo. I had skull surgery a few months earlier (long story for another post), and needed to have my head shaved. As I remember it, by the time school…
Depending on how you look at it, I wrote a book. Except that I already wrote it (it’s taken almost entirely from previous blog posts. And to be fair, it’s not really long enough to be a book (the good news is that you can easily read it in an hour or two, and that…
On my bike ride to work today, I was thinking about my current toolbox – the tools I use on a daily basis to get my job done (or to help me get my job done). Or, to be perfectly honest, I’ve been thinking about my toolbox for a while – I just thought about…
When I’m interviewing experienced candidates (for any software role), one question I frequently ask is, “What’s your super power?” I like hearing answers like, “I can learn new things really quickly”, or “I’ve found over 1000 security bugs”, or even “I’m a batch file (or other language) wizard”. Recognizing super (or special) powers in yourself…
Clearing out some random news and thoughts. None of them worth a post, but worth sharing…probably. A few days ago, I reposted the Microsoft SDET personas I originally wrote (5? years ago) for the MSDN tester center. They could use a bit of updating, but they hold the test of time fairly well (link here)….
It’s been a busy month. (I blame Xbox One for monopolizing my time), and I’m way overdue for what I meant to be a “day-after” follow up for my last post. If you didn’t read it (or if it’s been so long you’ve forgotten), here’s the summary and where we left off: “Automation” is an…
I frequently go days at work without writing code. On many days, I do “typical” test activities (seeing what works, what doesn’t work, etc.) Some days I’m debugging all day. Other days, I’m sifting through the perl and batch scripts that bolt our build process together. On other days, I’m managing projects, tweaking excel, or…
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…
I chair an advisory council for a community of senior testers at Microsoft. We have a variety of events ranging from talking heads to open space events to panels to whatever type of event we think is the most different than the previous one. Yesterday, we had our fifth annual “soapbox” event, a lightning talk-ish…
It’s interesting when I go back and look at the number of posts where I talk about what I do, what testing is to me, and how testing is changing. Ever since the Telerik Test Summit (telsum), I’ve been thinking even more about testing and how it fits into software development. When I wrote this…
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…
For the last day or so, I’ve been thinking a lot about programming and testing, about collaboration and walls, and about where this may all be going. This post is the start of my mental exploration of the subject. In the beginning… In How We Test Software at Microsoft, we told the story of Microsoft…
I haven’t blogged much recently, and it’s mainly for three reasons. I’m busy – probably the hardest I’ve worked in all of my time in software. And although there have been a few late nights, the busy isn’t coming from 80-100 hour weeks, it’s coming from 50 hour weeks of working on really hard shit….
Yesterday, I read a mail sent to an email alias I’m on, where the author was asking why tool X wasn’t enabled on his latest build. The mail looked something like this (genericized to protect the innocent). foo.service doesn’t appear to be working Repro: I installed the build from <build_path> I verified the binaries existed…
Last summer, I posted a short rant on multitasking. If you don’t want to read, it was my normal type of rant where I complain about people taking an already generalized statement and apply it even more widely. This week, in response to that post (some responses take longer than others), I received a pointer…
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…
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…
Last week, I spent my Wednesday evening talking with the folks at QASIG about test innovation. This is a variation on the talk I gave in November at Eurostar – changed enough so I didn’t get bored, and with some bonus chatter that can only come from a small friendly audience. The recording is here…