Some combination of fever and remnants of generic brand Sudafed from the building 30 first-aid cabinet seem to be forcing me to perform another round of keyboard pounding hoping that something close to comprehensible English will spew forth. We’ll see how it goes – luckily this is more or less a personal blog (where I…
As I’ve mentioned recently (and probably way too many times by now), I’m in Munich to give two presentations at OOP 2011. My first presentation is tomorrow. Tomorrow evening, in fact, in the “Night School” track. Tomorrow’s schedule has tutorials in the morning, lunch, two keynote sessions, and then, after a short break, 4 concurrent…
I’m sitting in a hotel room in Munich. I’m slightly jet lagged (I’ll recover by tomorrow), but feeling better than I’ve felt in a week. I’m feeling so good, in fact that I have an abundance of "things" I feel like writing about. If you don’t want to read a non-testing related post (or partially…
I should mention for those of you who don’t follow me on twitter, that my article Career Paths for Testers Using Personas is on StickyMinds (on the front page this week). Some more of my thoughts on Personas are here and here.
A month or two back, Amazon began sharing BookScan information with authors. I can now see how many copies of How We Test Software at Microsoft are selling (US only, and Nielsen BookScan only tracks the large-ish book sellers) – but it’s still sort of cool. I can’t help but wonder who in Houston bought…
Twenty-eleven is kicking off with a flurry of activity for me – I think by the time I breathe again, a month (or two!) will have flown by. First off, I have a short article showing up on TechWell next Monday. I hope I can talk Joey into letting me write somewhat regularly in the…
I’m taking some time off this month from work, and think I’ll take a break from blogging too until 2011 (I reserve the right to change my mind if something really interesting comes up). It’s been a pretty good year for me, but as I reflect, it was a busy year too. Here are some…
Amazon just started sharing Nielsen BookScan reports to authors. Since I don’t get commissions for How We Test Software at Microsoft (hwtsam), I don’t generally see sales numbers, but I’m happy to see that people still buy the book (note for internal readers – orders through msmarket do not reflect in the BookScan ratings). Anyway…
Part of our rhythm of business at Microsoft is setting yearly commitments. Technically, we do these in July for the fiscal year, but we were in the middle of shipping, so I didn’t get to my commitments until recently. On one hand, I don’t like commitments, as in many cases they don’t allow for change…
You probably couldn’t tell, but my last post was part of my exploration into careers in test. Which I’m exploring because of my worry that so many of the discussions in test haven’t changed in the last ten years. I better try to come up with a better explanation before everyone thinks I’m crazy. A…
I’ve been thinking about how professional testers describe themselves. We have high level labels like Tester, SDET, or Quality Engineer, but beyond those (mostly meaningless) titles, many of us have our own personal missions or visions – the words we want people to associate with us. For example, my twitter bio is, “Long time software…
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…
When I was 9 years old, I’d play pick up soccer at recess. A couple of kids – the “leaders” would pick teams, and then we’d play. Since we were kids, the leaders of the teams were sometimes the best players, but usually the loudest kids. Leadership was short-lived, but effective for the purpose. I…
I’m happy that my last post generated some discussion. I’m not sure about the rest of the blogosphere, but for some reason I seem to get half or more of the comments privately instead of through the blog comment system. Something I heard from a few people was this comment (anonymity retained). Why don’t you…
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what’s next in software testing. What are the new ideas in testing? What is our role in the future of quality software? How do we advance the state of the art in testing? But I worry. I think forward thinking will come from highly experienced testers with a…
On Thursday, November 11, at 4:00pm PST, I’ll be delivering another free web cast thing using Microsoft Lync (pre-setup instructions here). Signin information here: https://join.microsoft.com/meet/alanpa/37MWC1GQ Join by Phone: +18883203585 +14257063500 Find a local number Conference ID: 86935295 The talk will be a re-hash of my PNSQC talk (shortened a bit and…
Chris McMahon (who has an extensive music background) recently gave a wonderful presentation at SoftwareGR where he stated: The work of a performing artist is exactly the same as a functioning agile team. He goes on to explain that it isn’t a metaphor – it’s exactly the same thing. And I believe him. Later in…
I think I’m finally caught up and recovered from my brief North American tour last week. While it was fun to present at two conferences plus a customer talk in four days, I missed out on a the second day of both conferences, as well as the opportunity to meet nearly as many people as…
I just finished a talk at QAI Testrek on using personas. Again, I do a horrible job evaluating how my own talks go, but people asked a lot of good questions at the end, and I didn’t swear too many times, so I’ll call it a success. The gist of the talk is that creating…
PNSQC is still going strong (although it may be over by the time I post this). Sadly, my North American test conference tour forced me to miss the second day of the conference in order to make it to Toronto in time for the QAI Testrek conference. My opinion of PNSQC is the same as…