I came across a post this weekend about different types of knowledge It’s a well written post that calls out one of my favorite topics – you don’t know what you don’t know. I think the Five Orders of Ignorance (or my tribute to the five orders here) are brilliant, and the author nails…
I’m a fan of The Pragmatic Programmer, and often use the parable of boiled frogs (which I first read in that book) when talking about organizational change. The concept is simple enough – rather than put the frogs (people) in boiling water (changing everything at once), put the frogs (people) in cool water; then slowly…
I have half a dozen different blog posts started but I thought I’d write this one instead. When you listen to customer feedback, you need to treat the good and the bad equally. If some customers say “wow – this is awesome”, and some others say “this is awful – are you on crack?”, either…
I’m surprised that many people are still asking me what an angry weasel has to do with software testing. The answer, of course, is nothing. I’m surprised however, how many people can visit my site at angryweasel.com/blog and never check out plain old angryweasel.com (where I happen to share the story of where the name…
(part 1 is here) (part 2 is here) (part 3 is here) (part 4 is here) I’ve been in the Engineering Excellence (EE) team at Microsoft for nearly five years now, and the time has flown by. The job is completely different from a typical test role, yet almost all I talk about is testing….
(part 1 is here) (part 2 is here) (part 3 is here) When I joined the CE team in 2000, l knew nothing about embedded systems, and exactly as much about non-Intel processors. Furthermore, I didn’t know what I was supposed to do on the team. The Pocket PC had just come out, but the…
(part 1 is here) (part 2 is here) When I joined the Windows Millennium (I usually cover my mouth and mumble when I mention this product) team I was given the opportunity to join either the development or test team. I met with both the dev and test managers and disliked the test manager much…
(part 1 is here) My official full-time start date at Microsoft was June 6, 1995. The first release candidate for Windows 95 was June 8, so in a way I started just in time – I started in time to get the Win95 ship gift (limited edition of windows 95), and also got a watch…
Sometime around 9:00 in the morning, exactly fifteen years ago today, I parked my car in the building 4 parking lot on the Microsoft campus. An hour or so later, I was installing a recent build of Windows 95 and trying to learn the details of my new job as quickly as possible. New Years…
I don’t do resolutions, but I woke up this morning in a brand new year (I’m pretty sure everyone else did too). I haven’t been at work since the middle of December, and I’ve been able to pretty much ignore my day job since then. I’ve even managed to ignore most of the software testing…
I think it’s been a year since How We Test Software at Microsoft made its way to store shelves (and amazon). For the first few months, I watched the amazon sales ranking multiple times a day. I took a screenshot last December 18th that shows one of the few times we hit the #1 testing…
Perhaps it’s just the nature of the tester, but I’ve seen a lot of complaints from testers recently. “Managers do the wrong thing”, “Testers need to do more ‘x’”, “Testing isn’t taken seriously”, “These people don’t understand what I do”, gripe, mumble, etc. Of course, it’s easy for me to tell you to quit your…
Purely random non-testing info here, but important if you ever need to pick me out of a crowd. I’ve been having hair issues recently, and it’s been pointed out that I’ve become difficult to recognize. This blog post is your clue to finding me should I ever fall off the grid. Once upon a time…
My last post contained one of the tricks I use when writing – how I use iteration when I’m writing. It’s one technique I use to make steady progress and avoid writers block. Although that post was about iteration in general, it reminded me that I have a few other tricks that I wanted to…
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…
I’d like to offer a bit of advice for everyone in the world (but especially to software testers). In just about every thing you do, every day of your life, it is possible to do something wrong. My challenge to you is to think deeply about how you can do things “right”. Some examples: If…
I’m a huge soccer fan, and I’m happily following the MLS Cup even though the local team was eliminated last week. Last night’s match between Real Salt Lake (RSL) and the Chicago Fire went to penalty kicks before one team finally prevailed. After the game ended, I went to mlsnet.com to watch the highlights and…
When I meet new people, they often ask, “what do you do?” The answer I give initially, and the one I hope to get away with is, “I work at Microsoft.” It rarely works. They inevitably follow up with, “what do you do there?” – which, for better or for worse is a much more…
I just put together a collection of my published works (it’s not a long list). I also have an article coming out in a Korean testing magazine – I’ll see if I can get a link once it’s out. I’ve been writing less lately while I turn my attention toward my often neglected day job….
I may have mentioned this on the old blog, but I’m pretty sure I haven’t mentioned it here yet. O’Reilly media recently released Beautiful Testing – a collection of essays from a variety of testing professionals (including yours truly). I received my copy over the weekend (much to the annoyance, I’m sure, of several other…