Five for Friday – April 16, 2021

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…

Every day, it seems, I come across an article, a forum posting, a blog, or a tweet bemoaning the end-of-test-as-we-know-it because some company has hired / is hiring people with programming knowledge to become testers. I’ve written about coding-testers (here, and in other posts) before (as have many others that I’m too lazy to look…

Happy Friday everyone – here’s some stuff to dump from my head to yours. As I type this, I’m listening to Dead Man’s Pop – the remixed version of the Replacement’s Don’t Tell a Soul. I was/am a big Replacement’s fan, and these recordings are all kinds of excellent. This article on how Boeing’s Managerial…

I’ve watched a lot of teams try to be more agile or more adaptive, or just move to faster shipping cadence. It has taken me a while, but I think I see a pattern, and the hard stuff boils down to two things. Scope and Silos Scope Scope, in this context, is everything that goes…

Twenty-twelve has been a heck of a year so far. The day job has been keeping me swamped, but the work, the challenges, and the scope feel perfect – I’m having a great time, and I couldn’t ask for anything more in a job. Historically, most of my blog posts come from experiences or inspiration…

In software testing, we use a lot of words – some well known, others less so – to describe our testing activities. For as long as I’ve been in software (which is longer than most of you), we’ve debated and argued which descriptions, and which combinations of words best describe the various activities that fall…