Thanks to everyone who attended today’s brief web seminar. I’ll try anther one in a few weeks (topic suggestions are all welcome). Here is the video – audio tends to fade at some points (I’m investigating root cause), but hopefully it’s somewhat useful. Remember – this is my approach to (what I call) strategy –…
The background: I posted some thoughts on how I approach test strategy and what the term means to me a week or so ago. The Rat Pack had some questions on the post and I answered them. But the conversation made me realize that it may be beneficial if I take some time to talk…
A week or so ago, I tweeted the following: I loathe the use of "QA" as a verb to replace test. E.g. "Facebook needs to QA their features better" – that doesn’t make any f*ing sense. Paul Carvalho (@can_test) didn’t agree – he stated that test is a subset of qa, and that since he…
Test conference season is upon us, and so begins the onslaught of “slides” from powerpoint / keynote / (google docs presentation app whatever-it’s-called). I have seen hundreds of presentations on a wide variety of subjects over the years and thought I’d share what I know about what a presentation tells you about the presenter. The…
I threw out a few trust-based tweets this week. I’m a big fan of #trust in the workplace – hire smart people, coach & guide them, but give them plenty of freedom to do the right things You don’t have to (and shouldn’t) involve everyone in decisions. But build trust by sharing why and how…
I’m in the middle of little project for work (one of many things I have going on these days), and I was reminded of the fact that we don’t have anything close to a consistent language in testing. It’s nothing new – I blogged about this subject before, but I still don’t have a reasonable…
If you’re interested in stalking me, here are some places I’ll be in the coming months. On October 18th, I’ll be talking about code reviews at the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference. If you want to catch me there, you better catch me on the 18th, because I’m flying to Toronto on October 19th to…
There are many clear examples of dichotomy (mutually exclusive or contradictory categories) in the world. A light switch is on or off. A gun may have fired, or not fired. A software program is running, or it is not running. But many things we deal with are not dichotomous, but continuous. A person can be…
It’s PSA time! It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of what Joel Spolsky and co have done with with the stackoverflow family and stackexchange. The flat (yet easily structured via tags) structure is perfect for discoverability, and the psychological goodness of points, badges and reputation, can’t be beat. Now, if you look at…
There’s a pretty good presentation from the folks at Electric Cloud making the rounds on “why your automation isn’t” (and other variations on that title). The premise is, that testers spend too much time babysitting (supposedly) automated tests, and that testers end up doing a lot of manual work in order to keep their automation…
My last two posts (one on Tester DNA, and the most recent on worries about the future) were written in isolation. The started the DNA post many months ago, and the future at least a year ago. I started and stopped completing the posts several times since their inception before finally completing them. For a…
I’ve been thinking about writing this post for years, but have had it floating around between my head and a draft for the last few months. I’ve held on to the post because even though it’s not my intent, I’m probably going to piss off someone who takes my points the wrong way or misinterprets…
In HWTSAM, we (Ken, actually) talked a bit about tester DNA – that bit of mental goo that makes some people better (or at least more prone to being) testers. As I’ve been talking to (potential) testers lately, I’ve had a chance to dwell on this a bit more. What is it that makes a…
Due to some unforeseen issues, my experiments in remote work are continuing. These days, the situation is a bit different though – I’m working in the same time zone,and I’m showing my face at work one to two days a week. Of course, my observations and musings about working remotely continue. The days that I’ve…
Recently, I spent two weeks working remotely (i.e. far, far away from my office). The opportunity was there, and I happen to work on a product that makes working (and interacting) remotely straightforward. Since I know some of you who read this blog work remotely (and others would like to), I thought I’d share some…
I’m a big fan of exploratory testing. I’ve used the approach long before I knew what it was called and think it’s the core of good testing. it’s so ingrained in the general approaches I’ve used in my career that I often don’t differentiate between exploratory testing and plain-old-testing (I’ve gone as far to say…
I’m going to do one more (I think) post on this subject. Markus asked the following about my latest post: But how do I answer the question for “what’s the coverage of your testing?” for a multiple component-based application, consisting of a C/C++ major component, an application server, and customized business logic? The answer is…
Here’s a tip. Want me to write about something in particular? Ask me a question. It’s that easy. Tim Coulter had a question about my last blog post. He asked: Would love to hear how you check code coverage of manual testing, actually. Is that just “feature coverage” (break it up into logical blocks and…
My team at Microsoft is starting to use code coverage a little more diligently. Code coverage has been used for some time on the team, but we’re just now getting to a common approach and recording mechanism. There are a few things about our approach that are a bit different than I’ve seen most other…
I’ve been meaning to write about this particular anti-pattern for a while now, as I think it contributes far too much to the lack of progress in advancing software testing. Up until five minutes ago, I called this the anti-silver bullet theory, in reference to Fred Brooks 1986 paper, No Silver Bullet as much as the…