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February 2008 - Posts

Technical Debt

Posted Friday, February 29, 2008 1:33 PM by alanpa
Several years ago, I was on a product team in the midst of a ship cycle. I was part of the daily bug triage, where we reviewed, assigned, and sometimes - postponed bugs to the next release. Postponements happen for a variety of reasons, and are a necessary Read More...
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Future Test notes

Posted Thursday, February 28, 2008 1:48 PM by alanpa
Futuretest wrapped up today. I thought my talk went well - it was a bit of a challenge for me to take a huge topic and whittle it down to a 45 minute presentation, but I did it and managed to make all of the points I had planned. Joel Spolsky spoke immediately Read More...
5 Comments

Big Companies

Posted Monday, February 25, 2008 6:48 AM by alanpa
When I started at Microsoft, I thought it was a pretty big company (near 15,000 employees worldwide). These days, it's huge (pushing 90k employees or so). There have been some growing pains over the last decade. Communication across teams is harder, and Read More...
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Off to New York

Posted Friday, February 22, 2008 11:42 PM by alanpa
I'm in New York next week - first for Future Test , then off to Long Island to teach a quick class before heading home. New York is one of my favorite cities, and it's been a few years since I've been there - so I'm taking an extra day while I'm there Read More...
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Source control for testers - What Changed?

Posted Sunday, February 17, 2008 10:39 PM by alanpa
Other than the obvious uses (tracking changes in source code), there are a few uses for source control I think are interesting to testers. One of those uses is the ability to compare changes to isolate the cause of a bug or regression. The Hocus-Focus Read More...
3 Comments

The power of the cloud

Posted Wednesday, February 06, 2008 11:02 AM by alanpa
I finally got around to putting Vista on my laptop this week. My experience with Vista has been that clean installs work better, so that's what I did. I use my laptop a lot - I would guess of my 3 main computers (the others being my home and work desktop Read More...
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What are Universities for?

Posted Friday, February 01, 2008 12:12 AM by alanpa
I found out a few weeks ago that my university would like me to represent alumni of my department during the yearly spring alumni celebration (that's a lot of alumni in that sentence). My first reaction was something along the lines of "did you dial the Read More...
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