Five for Friday – July 26, 2019

I feel like today’s a good day to share a few stories about my first few months at Microsoft, and the (very) small part I played in shipping Windows 95. My start at Microsoft is a story on its own, and probably worth recapping here in an abbreviated form. I started at Microsoft in January…

I’ve been a big fan of iterating since before I knew I was doing it. When I first read The Pragmatic Programmer nearly ten years ago, I was delighted to read about the concept of Tracer Bullets applied to programming. The concept of tracer bullets (based on guns firing an occasional phosphorous round in order…

People talk a lot about how they got into testing (I was told I was a tester on my first day at a tech support job), but for those of us who have been in testing roles for a substantial amount of time, I think it’s equally important to think about why we have stayed in…

Although I’ve tried to avoid writing about test automation since publishing The A Word four years ago, I suppose I should probably take some time soon to add a few more chapters before the book (like my last one) becomes largely obsolete. Not too long ago, I posted some predictions. In those predictions, I said: Testers writing…

I love reading twitter after I give a talk, because I can review what I said and make sure I agree with it (I never know what will come out of my mouth when I’m on a stage in front of people – it’s part of my presentation style). At TestBash in Philadelphia, I (apparently)…

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…