Old Blog Posts

  • Home Again

    I implied at the end of my last post that I’d follow up after my keynote (I failed – sorry). This was a weird conference for me. While I attended nearly all of the keynotes, I only made it to a few other sessions, and didn’t have as much time to hang out with folks…

  • One down, two to go…

    it’s 6:30-ish pm, and I’m killing time waiting for my sound check for tomorrow’s keynote, and thought I’d do a quick brain dump of today’s tutorial session. Today’s session was “Alan Page: On Testing” – which is a pretty wide open topic. For the slide handouts, I slapped together slides from a bunch of things…

  • Perspective

    While cleaning out some boxes my Mom had packed away, I came across a yearbook from my freshmen year of high school. I hated my freshmen photo. I had skull surgery a few months earlier (long story for another post), and needed to have my head shaved. As I remember it, by the time school…

  • What’s Your Super Power?

    When I’m interviewing experienced candidates (for any software role), one question I frequently ask is, “What’s your super power?” I like hearing answers like, “I can learn new things really quickly”, or “I’ve found over 1000 security bugs”, or even “I’m a batch file (or other language) wizard”. Recognizing super (or special) powers in yourself…

  • This & That

    Clearing out some random news and thoughts. None of them worth a post, but worth sharing…probably. A few days ago, I reposted the Microsoft SDET personas I originally wrote (5? years ago) for the MSDN tester center. They could use a bit of updating, but they hold the test of time fairly well (link here)….

  • Rockin’ STAR West

    The cat’s out of the bag – I’m popping out of my no-conference bubble, and making an appearance at a testing conference (STAR West in October). The theme of the conference is “Be a Testing Rock star”, and while I think that theme begs for an appearance from Michael Larsen, I’ll do my best to…

  • Walls on the Soapbox

    I chair an advisory council for a community of senior testers at Microsoft. We have a variety of events ranging from talking heads to open space events to panels to whatever type of event we think is the most different than the previous one. Yesterday, we had our fifth annual “soapbox” event, a lightning talk-ish…

  • Tear Down the Wall

    It’s interesting when I go back and look at the number of posts where I talk about what I do, what testing is to me, and how testing is changing. Ever since the Telerik Test Summit (telsum), I’ve been thinking even more about testing and how it fits into software development. When I wrote this…

  • Filling A Hole

    I haven’t blogged much recently, and it’s mainly for three reasons. I’m busy – probably the hardest I’ve worked in all of my time in software. And although there have been a few late nights, the busy isn’t coming from 80-100 hour weeks, it’s coming from 50 hour weeks of working on really hard shit….

  • PBKAC?

    Yesterday, I read a mail sent to an email alias I’m on, where the author was asking why tool X wasn’t enabled on his latest build. The mail looked something like this (genericized to protect the innocent). foo.service doesn’t appear to be working Repro: I installed the build from <build_path> I verified the binaries existed…

  • Multitasking Revisited

    Last summer, I posted a short rant on multitasking. If you don’t want to read, it was my normal type of rant where I complain about people taking an already generalized statement and apply it even more widely. This week, in response to that post (some responses take longer than others), I received a pointer…