Anyone who reads this blog has probably also read about, or heard of the recent policy from Marissa Mayer at Yahoo recalling home-office based employees back to the office (Bing search here in case you’ve been under a rock). Most of the reactions I’ve seen to this policy are correctly identifying this as a management…
Although I really enjoy talking about testing, I’m (purposely) speaking a lot less these days. I have a day-job that I love, and I like hanging out in the rainy Pacific Northwest. As of now (and I think a plan change is a long shot), I’m travelling to exactly one conference in CY13 (StarWest in…
“Hey – can you set up a repro of that bug for me?” As a tester, how many times have you heard this phrase? How many times have you walked through the steps you outlined in the bug report so someone could look at an error for you? Or – how many times have you…
I was talking with a colleague of mine this morning about his role and what it meant, and I made a mental note to blog about some of my ideas. Given that my ability to remember anything peaks at about a day, I thought I better write it down now. I predict there will be…
I came across a few comments and statements recently that set off a slightly red (orange?) flag for me. The gist was that debugging was for coders, and that testers “just found the issues”. I get the context (or at least I think I get it) – I agree that all testers don’t have to…
I’m not sure if this is a musician’s perspective of learning or something more universal, but it’s something that I think about often. When learning, there’s value in training, lessons, reading, and other learning opportunities, but there’s much more value (IMO) in practice – but I’m not sure if that’s how everyone sees it (or…
I’ve been playing with the Thematic Framework for WordPress a bit over the last few months. I like it because it’s simple, easily extendable and massively tweakable. I’m not much of a designer, but I was having fun making my own child theme for Thematic when I came across Child’s Play theme from scottnix.com. I…
As 2012 comes to a close, I thought I’d recap the year. I think this little exercise is mostly for me, but I suppose new blog readers (or people with too much free time) may find some points of interest. Some more from the non-Microsoft front follows. My most popular blog posts from the last…
I uploaded my Eurostar keynote slides to SlideShare. As with most of my talks, the slides don’t read well on their own (I sort of hate bullet points). I rarely repeat talks, but given timing and audience, I may consider giving this again as a webinar at some point (I’m also done travelling for a…
I’ve been home for a few days from by brief trip to Amsterdam for EuroStar. As I mentioned in a previous blog post (or two), I used my Surface RT as my only device for the trip. Overall, it went quite well. I was able to accomplish most of the things I wanted to, including…
If you read my last post (sorry, no link – I’m not ready to try that yet), you’ll know that I’m attempting to use my Microsoft surface device as my only electronic device on my trip to Amsterdam for Eurostar. So far, it’s working ok. The cover/keyboard works better than I though tit would – although…
I had a not-so-good week last week.Lot’s of stuff too private for blog sharing, but let’s just say it was a cascade of dark and bad times that nobody should have to go through. One of the bits of bad luck was that the LCD on my laptop broke. Normally, this wouldn’t be so bad….
Some news about my involvement in upcoming conferences I’m probably overdue to share. First of all, I’ll be giving a keynote at Euro STAR on November 6th. This is my first trip to Euro STAR, and my first visit to Amsterdam (at least my first visit where I’ll leave the airport). There are a lot…
On twitter, @SeanNoxious asked me about my most memorable bug. The answer is way too long for twitter, so I thought I’d document one of my favorites here. When I first joined Microsoft way back in 1995, I was a tester for networking components on Windows 95. One of the areas I owned was testing…
I spoke recently on the topic of “Customer Focused Test Design” (synopsis: customers don’t really care how much functional testing testers do, or how many bugs they find. A test approach that favors scenarios, -ilities, and customer feedback is better; and a bunch of examples for emphasis/proof). Part of the approach I suggest (and have…
Note: no direct information on software testing or software engineering is in this post. This is purely a trip report (that happens to be related to a trip I took to talk about testing). As I begin writing this, I’m in the middle of a trip to New Zealand and Australia. The main purpose of…
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…
I’ve been gathering some information on test automation systems recently and will probably have a flurry of posts upcoming on automation and related subjects. Some observations as I browse what Bing has to tell me about the subject of Test Automation: Wikipedia tells me that test automation “commonly involves automating a manual process already in…
Today I saw yet another info-byte on the perils of multi-tasking. I too, think that multitasking is rarely (if ever) as productive as multitaskers believe it is (note: my favorite study compares bong hits with multitasking…ymmv) – but we’ve all seen stuff like this over time. What’s missing from many of the studies and stories…
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…