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PNSQC Slides

Posted Tuesday, October 27, 2009 1:10 PM by alanpa
Thanks to everyone who attended my talk today. Feel free to fire more questions here if you have them. Slides are available here . Read More...
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Words and Status (and rants!)

Posted Tuesday, May 19, 2009 8:41 PM by alanpa
Words are funny things. We use them to convey meaning - but there's more to words than that. We also use words to try to change the way people view things. In real estate advertisements, for example, you see words like "rustic" used instead of "old", Read More...
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Terms and other things we can’t agree on

Posted Saturday, March 07, 2009 7:21 PM by alanpa
I was in a meeting last week where we had a long drawn out discussion of some terms around scenarios, use cases, and design. I knew the ambiguity was there, but watching the conversation unfold reminded me how important a common understanding of terminology Read More...
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Metrics at STAR Conference

Posted Saturday, January 17, 2009 7:22 AM by alanpa
I think I forgot to mention that I'll be speaking at STAR this spring. You'd think I'd be pimping hwtsam , but instead I'm speaking about something barely mentioned in the book at all - metrics . Software metrics are an old passion of mine - something Read More...
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DRE

Posted Tuesday, February 27, 2007 5:26 PM by alanpa
I know I'm overdue for a post when Bj starts lapping me on posts. This week, I've been finishing up my presentations for STAR and PSQT (for those who haven't presented at a conference before, presenters are expected to have their presentation complete Read More...
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Exploring Exploratory Testing

Posted Friday, December 29, 2006 5:09 PM by alanpa
Exploratory testing seems to be the “it” word of software testing these days. Everyone from high profile consultants to newbie testers are talking about exploratory testing. My nature (similar to that of many testers) is to be a bit of a naysayer, and Read More...
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SDETs at Microsoft

Posted Wednesday, December 13, 2006 3:49 PM by alanpa
Some time ago, MS began hiring primarily people with a programming background (industry or educational background) for test positions. As far as I know, there was no press announcement, but the idea seems to have worked its way into the overall global Read More...
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The happy path should always pass

Posted Thursday, November 30, 2006 11:14 PM by alanpa
I was in a discussion with some other test architects at work today. We were talking about challenges in testing, and at one point in our discussion someone mentioned his frustration in finding bugs in the basic functionality of an application or interface. Read More...
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About Certifications

Posted Tuesday, November 21, 2006 8:18 AM by alanpa
I was listening to talk radio on the way home from work last night, and the topic of discussion was the recent crane accident a few miles from Microsoft in Bellevue. The focus of the discussion was on the capability of the crane operator, and one of the Read More...
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Thoughts from the week

Posted Sunday, November 12, 2006 12:30 PM by alanpa
I'll post this tomorrow, but currently I'm somewhere over the northern US or southern Canada returning from a week in the Boston area. I spent the last week talking to testers from Groove and Softricity. Technically, I was delivering training, but all Read More...
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Where do they get this stuff?

Posted Sunday, November 12, 2006 12:30 PM by alanpa
In the "if it's on the internet, it must be true?" category is this article and quote from it-director.com ( Malik Arjun originally brought the article to my attention) The ratio of testers to programmers is now 3:1 . This has given Microsoft another Read More...
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Building better software with the NM model

Posted Monday, October 09, 2006 7:24 AM by alanpa
In the course I teach for senior testers, we spend a few hours talking about different approaches to software development (waterfall, agile, v, w, rup, etc.). At the end of the discussion I, of course, tell them which approach is best. Of course, I'm Read More...
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Testing for correctness?

Posted Wednesday, October 04, 2006 1:01 PM by alanpa
This morning I watched a short video where the presenters looked at a UI element and asked questions on determining if it was "correct". It's a short (six minute) video, so please take a minute to view it for context. The overall theme is that rather Read More...
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Debugging 100

Posted Monday, October 02, 2006 1:35 PM by alanpa
Universities typically title their introductory courses XYZ 101: Introduction to XYZ. Often, the 101 courses require that students have some basis of knowledge in the area (e.g. pre-algebra for a math 101 course, or some level of writing skills for an Read More...
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Kaner's five year plan

Posted Thursday, September 21, 2006 10:14 AM by alanpa
I usually don't write commentary about other peoples blogs, but Cem Kaner had an interesting post a few weeks ago that I wanted to talk about. The first thing that jumped out at me was this quote: I think there are a lot of good, diligent, motivated black-box Read More...
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