Conferences – again!

A little over five weeks ago, I got a new job (one of the things I find great about MS is that one can change jobs completely without going through the hassle of filling out new forms). In that five weeks, I was in Germany for four days, and off for two days for Thanksgiving,…

I’ve been thinking recently about what ‘code quality’ and what the phrase means. How does someone identify the difference between low quality code and high quality code (or medium quality code)? In my quest for knowledge, I discovered a few interesting things. I discovered the Spinellis book, Code Quality: The Open Source Perspective. I haven’t…

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…

Chris McMahon, who has always impressed me with his words and his wit called me out in his blog. Specifically: Apropos of my criticism of “Context Driven Approach to Automation in Testing” (I reviewed version 1.04), I ask you to join me in condemning publicly both the tone and the substance of that paper. Almost…

I first heard of “10x” software development through the writings of Steve McConnell. Code Complete remains one of my favorite books about writing good software (The Pragmatic Programmer, Writing Solid Code, and The Clean Coder are also on that list). Steve McConnell’s rarely updated blog (titled 10x Software Development, contains the following tagline: Numerous studies…