I spent last week lounging on the beaches of Maui with my family. I didn’t stay completely away from work or the interwebz, but after a day or so of sun and fun,I did manage to unwind enough to lose track of days of the week. I spent a lot of time reading on the…
Inspiration for my blog posts often comes from whatever’s evoking emotion in my life (annoyances, victories, gripes, etc.). Three things happened today that ensured that I’d write this post. Here’s the story of a question from a seven year old, a phone call, and an email. The first incident was a common one. My son…
Yesterday, Michael Larsen posted a review of Weinberg’s book, The Secrets of Consulting. I’ve been meaning to share a few thoughts about this book for at least year, so I thank Michael for spurring me to finally share my thoughts and experiences with TSoC. If you haven’t read this book, I bet it’s because the…
I try to read a lot about testing in blogs, articles, books etc. A few days ago, I came across this quote, and it struck me in an odd way. “Commonly, test automation involves automating a manual process already in place that uses a formalized testing process” The source doesn’t matter, as it turns…
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….
I’ve been thinking recently about what ‘code quality’ and what the phrase means. How does someone identify the difference between low quality code and high quality code (or medium quality code)? In my quest for knowledge, I discovered a few interesting things. I discovered the Spinellis book, Code Quality: The Open Source Perspective. I haven’t…
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…
I’ve been on vacation (whatever that means) for almost a week now, and don’t plan to post again until 2012. To help fill in the break (and for anyone new to my blog), I thought I’d share some stats and popular posts from the last twelve months. I wrote 60 blog entries in 2011. Some…
I’m a Senior Tester, don’t you know Been testing software for five years or so I got bills to pay and need a better job… Looking for jobs with ‘Senior’ in the name Gotta’s admit, they’re all pretty lame Looks like I’m over-qualified… Someone (non-Microsoft) asked me recently what a “Senior Tester” does. I told…
A little over five weeks ago, I got a new job (one of the things I find great about MS is that one can change jobs completely without going through the hassle of filling out new forms). In that five weeks, I was in Germany for four days, and off for two days for Thanksgiving,…
Chris McMahon’s latest post (Just Fix It) proposes that as far as bug tracking goes, the best course of action is to skip the “tracking” part of the workflow and “Just Fix It.” I’m a huge fan of this approach and think that for the most part, tracking a large number of bugs in a…
I posted a few months ago regarding my move to using a virtual machine as my “mail” machine. I’m still a huge fan of that approach, but in my new job (the really cool one working on the Xbox team!), I’m running Win7 rather than server as my main machine. I looked into using an…
I’ve been thinking about testing activities and tester roles lately, or more lately, since it seems to be a recurring topic on this blog. I have to admit that I remain a bit surprised how often testers argue about what is and what isn’t testing. So – let me throw a few examples of potential…
As I’m writing this (or at least starting to write this), I’m on a plane from Frankfurt to JFK airport in New York (where I will catch another flight home to Seattle). I was in Frankfurt for the first ever German Testing Day event. The event is put on by the same folks that put…
I’m in Frankfurt for a few days, and tomorrow (Wednesday), I am giving a keynote at German Testing Day on Test Innovation at Microsoft. At this point, I’ll give you a few moments to chuckle, laugh, or make snide remarks about the topic. I think I’ve heard it all before; “testers at MS just write…
This post isn’t really testing related, so skip it if that’s what you’re looking for. Late Saturday night, I returned from my first trip to Israel. I was invited to present at the Intel Software Professional’s conference in Tel Aviv a few months back, and I gave an updated version of my STAR East 2010…
I’ve been having one of those experiences where a lot of the random bits of flotsam on my radar are sort of converging. But I don’t know if it’s really convergence, or if I’m forcing it. I hope it’s the former, but time will tell. In my last post, I reflected on a wonderful article…
…the paradox of testing: We want to find defects in the software under test, but we do not really want to find them".”Phillip Armour I often speak of Phillip Amour’s Five Orders of Ignoranceas they relate to software engineering (note; as of this writing, that link doesn’t work, but I don’t have another link to…
Last Tuesday, I went to a pub near my house to watch Sounders FC win their third straight US Open Cup. For most of the game, there were just three of us watching the match, but it was still a lot of fun to watch. With about five minutes left in the match (the Sounders…