Five for Friday – January 22, 2021

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…

Status meetings are boring. More importantly, status meetings are unneeded. Meetings are for discussion, and updates on status rarely require that (until, of course, they do). Nothing – nothing is more painful than sitting through a meeting where people go around the table and say, “Today, I’m doing X”.  Hopefully nothing alarming so far. A lot of teams…

In my last post, I wrote a bit about what it takes to build a great team, and how it takes a great team to build great software (which also covers about half of what I spoke about at STAR West in October). In this post, I’ll see if I can cover the other main…

PNSQC is still going strong (although it may be over by the time I post this). Sadly, my North American test conference tour forced me to miss the second day of the conference in order to make it to Toronto in time for the QAI Testrek conference. My opinion of PNSQC is the same as…

Short story is that TestBash may be my new favorite testing conference. Great venue (no, fantastic venue), well-organized, and excellent variety and diversity across the different presentations. I was reflecting while walking the streets of Philadelphia this morning and realized that almost every talk was experiential – filled with stories of problem solving and discovery. For those who…