Oh my – another quality post. I’m afraid I’m starting a trend for myself, but I have a story to share. As all gainfully employed workers in the tech field will tell you, we all have side jobs as tech support for all members of our immediate and extended families. This weekend, my mother-in-law opened…
Leave it to Adam Goucher to beat me to the punch line. When I proposed that breaking down your definition of quality to a manageable set of ilities is a reasonable method for improving customer perceived quality, the logical next step is to try and find out which of the ilities you need to care…
If you ever want to start a great discussion / debate with a group of testers, ask them to define quality and come up with measurements.“Quality” is such an overloaded term that it’s hard to get people to agree. The Weinberg fans (I suppose I’m one of them) will cite their mentor and say “Quality…
I’ve been blogging for nearly 5 years now. When I first started, I didn’t think I wanted to be a blogger – I just wanted a place to interact with customers. I quickly realized that I liked writing and started to study writing and used blogging to work on my writing. Now, 5 years later,…
I’ve run into more and more people lately who are astounded that software ships with known bugs. I’m frightened that many of these people are software testers and should know better. First, read this “old” (but good) article from Eric Sink. I doubt I have much to add, but I’ll try. Many bugs aren’t worth…
On request from Adam Goucher – another excerpt from How We Test Software at Microsoft. BTW – Adam wrote a review of HWTSAM here – although Linda Wilkinson beat him to the clever title. This is from a section on quality in chapter 16. It’s something I believe strongly in and would love to hear…
Last night, I was sitting in bed reading the latest issue of TapeOp (music recording magazine). I used to be moderately involved in recording music, but these days I mostly just follow the trends and try to stay sharp. TapeOp has a lot of interviews with recording engineers and producers, and it’s great to hear…
In music, the better you are at the basics, the better you are on the bandstand. Even the pro musicians I know practice almost every day. I think testers (and developers) forget the value of practice too often. In The Passionate Programmer, Chad Fowler suggests doing the exercises on CodeKata. I checked them out, and…
I answered a few questions this week about automating GUI tests. One question was about recommendations for GUI automation tools for non-coders, and the other was about how much time to spend on the GUI in an MVC (model-view-controller) application. The answers were easy. In the first case, I said that they weren’t going to…
I am always frustrated and somewhat sad when I hear testers whine or complain that they are not treated fairly; or that they are not respected; or that their development peers look down on them. I’ve been sitting on this post for many months wondering if I should post it or not when this thread…