I’m leaving early tomorrow morning for the Writing About Testing conference. I wasn’t able to attend WAT last year, but I’m looking forward to the trip, the meeting and talking with a group of great testers (who all enjoy writing about what we do). I don’t think there was ever a point when I thought,…
To Automate, or not to Automate, that is the question that confuses testers around the world. One tester may say, "I automate everything, I am a test automation ninja!". Another tester may say, "I do not automate, if I automate I fail to engage my brain properly in the testing effort!". Another may say, “I…
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…
Despite the lame title, this isn’t yet another post attempting to describe what testing is – it’s just something I wanted to share inspired by a small discussion last night (although if you browse the testing blogosphere, you’ll find a lot of good discussion on this topic lately). I went to Seth Eliot’s talk at…
Thanks to everyone who attended the presentation today. Video and slides are below. For those who asked – some of my other online talks are here: Thoughts on test strategy – http://www.vimeo.com/15853235 Code reviews for testers – http://www.vimeo.com/16753993 Ride the Gravy Train (and other career tips) from Alan Page. Ride the gravy train…
I recently wrote a bit about my role on the Lync test team at Microsoft. I thought it may be interesting to share a bigger picture of what the team does for those interested in how we do what we do. At the surface is the "who" and the "what" of the team. We have…
I ranted a bit on twitter last week about this book excerpt from Capers Jones. I’ve always had respect for Jones’s work (and still do), but some of the statements in this writing grated on me a bit. This could be (and is likely) because of how I came across the article (more on that…
I haven’t done an online presentation in quite a while now. I’m always happy to share my thoughts on testing with anyone who wants to listen. It was nice to have the opportunity in January to present to a rather large audience on test design as part of a SoftwareTestPro web cast, but I enjoy…
I have somewhat of a non-traditional test role at Microsoft. I’m a tester (that’s what my business card says), but I don’t own any specific components or features. I test, but mostly where I want to discover something for myself, experiment with an idea, or when I’m coaching others. The bulk of my time, in…
I thought I could raise a bit of controversy by announcing that I’ll be spending a reasonable chunk of my time working on certifications.I teased the twitter-verse with a few hints, wondering if the wolves would pounce on me, but 1) I don’t have that many followers, and 2) since I’m always pissing people off,…
In the absence of information, people will make stuff up. This is a phrase I share often with mentees and colleagues – most often when talking about progress on a project they’re working on. I once saw a colleague take a lot of heat for a project he was leading – he was making great…
Whew – what a week it’s been. There’s only drawback I can think of from being in Switzerland last week is that my work and meeting load this week has been nearly double. Given that I’m still catching up from my India trip last month, I’m quite thankful that my travel schedule is light in…
I spent the last few days in Zurich – it was a brief, but nice stay. I left Seattle on Sunday, and arrived in Zurich on Monday – I spent the afternoon touring the city in an attempt to walk off jet lag. On Tuesday, I gave a presentation to a group of customers and…
In a recent talk on test design (link), I discussed the concept of "useful tests". In my definition, useful tests are tests that provide new information. Almost every test is useful…once – typically the first time it’s run where it shows that the underlying functionality is working. From that point on, many tests function primarily…
I meant to post this a few days ago, but I just passed my one-year anniversary on the Lync (formerly Office Communicator) team. I enjoyed my time in the engineering excellence team at Microsoft, but I didn’t realize how much I missed being part of a software team until, well – a year or so…
I do a lot of mentoring and coaching within Microsoft. I like to help people, it’s fun, and it’s nice that I have a manager that sees the value in that. Sometimes, the coaching I do is on improving testing ability, increasing testing breadth or brainstorming testing ideas. Most often, however, I help people think…
I’m in Hyderabad, India this week to meet with some of our team and to give a handful of presentations at an internal conference. The weather is wonderful this week – it’s warm during the day and cool at night. I got to the hotel around 2:00am Tuesday morning, but got a few hours of…
In case you missed it (because I only mentioned it on twitter), I have another article up on Sticky Minds this week. Here’s the abstract: Many testers have been involved in post-ship decisions about bugs that "got away"–bugs that escaped testing and found their way into customer’s hands. Often, these post-mortem discussions end up with…
After my presentation at PNSQC in October, I was giving away copies of How We Test Software at Microsoft, and Michael Larsen said that if I gave him a copy, he’d review it on his blog. I figured that was better than giving it to someone to sell on ebay, so I took a shot….
Michael Bolton noticed my last blog post and wrote a nice follow up outlining several factors that lead to testers getting lost in the weeds vs. finding great bugs. I had my own ideas when I wrote the post, but the breadth of suggestions from Michael, as well as from commenters on the original post…