I’m back working again – or I guess I should say je suis de retour. I took a few weeks off in southwestern France, one thing led to another, and I decided to stay a bit longer than I originally planned. I’m working remotely for a week or two before returning stateside. It’s nice to…
I’m taking a vacation. usually people say a “much needed vacation”, or a “long overdue vacation”, but in my case it’s just a vacation. My new job is keeping me interested, engaged and I’m having fun – truthfully, I can’t wait to get back, but it will be nice to spend some time with the…
I probably haven’t mentioned in a while how nice it is to be back on a product team. The complexity and dynamic nature of software development is something I missed more than I knew, and I’m having fun being back in the flow of shipping a product for a million or so users. One thing…
I left out a couple of obvious things in my career post yesterday and thought I’d write them down before I forgot. Managers Yesterday, I wrote about the non-management career path for testers at MS. There is, indeed, a career path for managers – I just tend to talk about the non-management career path because…
I’d like to elaborate on something from a previous post on SDETs at Microsoft. One thing that is perhaps a bit different about the test role at Microsoft is its tie to the career path. We are, for better or worse, big believers in career growth and expect growth in scope and impact from all…
I have some random stuff to share – most of it not worthy of a post, so I’m consolidating. I’ll be heading to Toulouse in a few weeks for a bit of a vacation. Looking forward to the time off, as well as food, wine, and warm weather. At one point in my life, I…
I’d like to announce my candidacy for…no – not that kind of politics, I thought I’d drop a few comments on office politics. Too often, people see “politics” as the evil underbelly of the corporate world, and that competency in office politics requires that you can backstab your coworkers with no remorse, find a variety…
At a recent internal forum, I hosted a panel discussion comprised of “senior” level testers at Microsoft. The panel was evenly split between managers and non-managers and we took random questions from the audience on career paths in test. The testers in the panel had experience ranging from 11 to 24 years in test. Some…
A few weeks ago, I talked about some presentations I was involved with for internal audiences at Microsoft. Joe Strazzere asked if I could share slides or elaborate, so here goes (on one topic at least). I’ve never met Joe – but I feel like I know him a little. I interact with testers regularly…
I’m planning to give an internal presentation this week on what I do. I’ve been in my new job for three months, and although I’m still learning, I have enough of a routine that I’d like to share it with a few peers across the company to get feedback and ideas. Most of what I…
Every year, Microsoft’s Engineering Excellence group holds an internal conference – five days of talks, panels, booths and receptions (in other words, it’s just like any other conference, except only Microsoftees are invited). This is the first year since 2004 where I’ve been at the conference and not in the EE group. You’d think that…
I wrote a bit of a career retrospective just a few months before I joined the Communicator team at Microsoft (the series is captured in these posts: (part 1 is here, part 2 is here, part 3 is here, part 4 is here, and part 5 is here). June 6, 1995 – exactly 15 years…
Many of you know that I’m a big fan of the five orders of ignorance (link is to my interpretation – the author’s original paper is here). I especially like the concept of “unknown unknowns” those bits of knowledge that are critical – despite the fact that we didn’t recognize those bits until they fell…
I took an internal training course last week where we heard lectures from a bunch of MS execs (I don’t do it justice – it was far more interesting than I anticipated and something I’d do again in a heartbeat). Anyway, one of the lecturers was talking about software markets and showed a diagram that…
I gave a short talk to an internal MS community this week. The topic of the day was “influence”, and I thought it was appropriate to talk about the value of building (and maintaining!) an informal network – and the impact of that network on influence. The advice to have an informal network isn’t new…
I recently read The Checklist Manifesto: How To Get Things Right by Atul Gawande. This is yet another book not about testing that testers should read. Gawande is a surgeon and relates his experiences from the field of medicine throughout the book. )ne of the first chapters goes into depth on the growing complexity and…
In a conversation last week at STAR, someone was talking about how far testers should debug an issue. Personally, I don’t like it when testers only report the surface of the bug, and I think good testers always dig a little deeper to see what other more interesting issues may be lurking a layer or…
For anyone who recently attended STAR East and saw my presentation, thank you for attending, and for reading my blog. Some of you have viewed the slides on the proceedings CD and noticed that it’s not really like what I presented. I tend to change quite a bit of material between the date the slides…
It’s Thursday night, and I have just returned home from STAR East. Lee Copeland said that he thought it was the best STAR conference ever, and I know many who agreed with him. As for me, I had a great time, but was a bit too distracted from trying not to suck at my keynote…
Some thoughts from me over on Inder Singh’s blog if you’re interested (in the article as well as in the comments). More from STAR East later this week.