Five for Friday – April 12, 2019

For testers, being skeptical is generally a good thing. When someone says, “Our application doesn’t have any reliability errors”, I, for one, am skeptical. I’ll poke and prod and (usually) find something they haven’t thought about. There’s power in skepticism. Last year, I led a team of testers in performing code reviews of production code….

Way back in 2008 when I wrote chapter three of HWTSAM, I briefly mentioned the HiPPO in the context of ship room (war room) meeting structure: Everyone’s voice is important. A phrase heard in many war rooms is “Don’t listen to the HiPPO”—where HiPPO is an acronym for highest-paid person’s opinion. It was a term…

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 just got back from (yet another) vacation with the family – it’s been fun spending some extra time with the family this summer, but I think we’re (almost) done now, and it’s time to get back to work and to start thinking transitioning the kids into sleep schedules that accommodate school hours. With the…

It’s Friday, and there’s a lot going on in the world. I am finding the latest (and current) Trump trial interesting, and there’s big news in the Swifty world this week – but I’ll keep my links this week to the tech and leadership adjacent topics I usually try and stick with (just kidding –…

I mentioned on twitter that Barack Obama and I both left our old jobs on the same day. The world has been a very different place for both of us since then. Twitter is full of politics – and I’m completely ok with that, and happy to join in with my own opinions and thoughts….