notes and rants : HWTSAM

PNSQC Slides

alanpa — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:10:23 GMT

Thanks to everyone who attended my talk today. Feel free to fire more questions here if you have them.

Slides are available here.

HWTSAM in China

alanpa — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:48:03 GMT

I’m excited to see that the Chinese version of HWTSAM is out (and soon to be followed by a Korean translation).

You can find information here:

http://www.china-pub.com/196002

and on Amazon.

My STAR talk

alanpa — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 19:21:23 GMT

My talk’s over – I’ve received a lot of positive feedback (although the people who hate my talks never track me down).

I did have fun though, so at least one person in the room had a great time. My slides (which are nothing like the slides I submitted) are here if you’d like to take a look.

Another HWTSAM Video Podcast

alanpa — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 22:33:57 GMT

This one is a recap of chapter 2. We’ve filmed though chapter 8, but we’re a little behind on production. We hope to catch up by end of summer.

More HWTSAM reviews

alanpa — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 07:23:23 GMT

Been incredibly busy lately, but wanted to share a few other HWTSAM reviews.

There’s a review on stickyminds that’s pretty good (and yes, I agree that Ken may have been a little to “rah-rah” about testing at Microsoft, but to each his own).

There’s also a nice write up and discussion over on software testing club.

Finally, Ken has put together a nice list of all of the reviewers over on his blog.

Thanks again everyone for the support.

Another review of HWTSAM

alanpa — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 01:41:43 GMT

So far, the blogosphere in general has had a better experience with the book than the amazon reviewers :)

Here is a link to the latest review I found. Thanks Michael for taking the time to write this up.

PNSQC 2009

alanpa — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 01:19:00 GMT

It looks like (pending paper composition and acceptance) that I’ll be heading three hours south this October to present at the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference in Portland, OR. I’ll be presenting on “The role of experienced testers on software quality” (or something like that).

I’m also excited that (at least) two of the bloggers I follow will also be presenting.

Marlena Compton, who has some great ideas on metrics and visualization in testing, and the Testy Redhead (who I believe won best paper last year) will also be presenting. On top of that, Elisabeth Hendrickson will be giving a keynote. I’m excited to be a part of it and think it will be a fantastic conference.

Odds and Ends

alanpa — Thu, 28 May 2009 06:04:00 GMT

It’s been busier than normal for me at Microville recently. My friend (and frequent soccer match viewing partner) James Whittaker ended his 3-year run at Microsoft last week. James still lives locally, and I expect that we’ll continue to collaborate in the future. The pettier downside of James’ departure is that some of our shared projects now fall to me – it’s a bit more work, but all stuff I love to do (although it may not be the stuff that my boss wants me to do). I’m sure I’ll figure out a way to fit it all in.

It looks like you can preorder Beautiful Testing on Amazon. I wrote a chapter for the book on Large Scale Test Automation. I’ll leak some details in this blog between now and when the book comes out.

The Chinese and Korean translations of hwtsam are well under way. I hope I can get my hands on a copy of each of the translations when they are available.

Next week is the yearly “engineering forum” at Microsoft. We take one week every year and hold something that’s quite similar to a conference like SD West or PDC. We have a hundred or so talks spread over 5 days, including keynotes from the bigwigs. Our group (the larger group – not just my little team) are responsible for putting it on, so there’s a bit of “ship stress” in the air at building 21.

Things should be back to normal shortly. Now, it’s time to get back to those 30 “red” todo items and 50 or so unread emails in my inbox.

The HWTSAM bug list (so far)

alanpa — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 02:28:00 GMT

No book on testing would be complete without a bug list. HWTSAM is no exception! Some “book people” call this stuff errata, but let’s just call a bug a bug.

There are two distinct types of bugs: Author bugs, and Production bugs. The Author bugs are those where we, as authors, made mistakes. The Production bugs were introduced after our final sign off. To you, the end user, it doesn’t matter – these are bugs. If we ever do a second edition, we’ll take care of all of these.

Here’s what we know about so far:

1) In the intro, I state that Ken approached me in the fall of 2007. On reflection, it was actually late fall 2006. I began writing the first chapter in January 2007 (chapter 4 to be exact). Minor issue, but an Author Bug nonetheless.

2) The table on p. 19 is missing a line between USA (California) and Hyderabad (Production Bug)

3) There’s a bit of weirdness with the code coverage data on page 119. Bj explains it in detail on his blog here. (Author bug)

4) On page 125, the text refers to the Int.Parse() function, but it doesn’t exist in the code fragment (oops – Author Bug)

5) In the code sample on the bottom of page 235, I have mismatched quotes in two of the lines. (definite Author Bug).

6) The story about testing on page 227 has the phrase “as shown in the following graphic…” For technical reasons, we pulled that graphic, but missed that bit of referring text (Author Bug)

7) Figure 14-2 on page 327 reads “Browsers (IF, Firefox, Mozilla). The IF should be IE or Internet Explorer but not IF (Author Bug)

8) Part IV starts on p. 363, but the section text at the top of the pages changes to part IV at the beginning of chapter 14. (Production Bug)

9 )In the index (p. 413), Königsberg has garbage characters in place of the ö (Production Bug)

10) We forgot to include a bibliography (or forgot to think thoroughly about including one). Although we reference a lot of books via footnotes in the text, one tester in particular is quite annoyed that we didn’t reference the writing that inspired us in the first place. I’ll post a bibliography sometime and include one in the 2nd edition.

July 15, 2009 Adding a few more:

11) In the graphic on page 235 of HWTSAM, the ellipsis falls after “Test Case #100”, rather than between “Test Case #8” and “Test Case #100” (Author bug) - Thanks to Jeremy Ellsworth

12) Table 5-1, bottom of page 83, should have an i2 in the Invalid class subsets column, instead of just an i after i1 (Author Bug) - thanks to Shaun McCabe

13) BVA test #39 on page 97 should have 1 as the month instead of 3 (Author Bug) - sorry - I don't remember who told me this one

I’m sure I’m missing a few more – I’ll add them as I find or hear about them.

Worst Practices

alanpa — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 23:22:48 GMT

I know several people (not just context-driven folks) who cringe a bit at the concept of "Best Practices". The point of controversy is that practices depend on context. What's "best" for one context may not be a good idea at all in another context. I suppose it's a bit of a word game, but a team can be led astray if they follow a "best practice" blindly (of course, any time you follow something blindly, you will probably walk off of a cliff). The point is that "best practices" - while they may be "best" in most situations, may not always be "best".

Got it?

But that's not the point of this post.

Unfortunately,I see the inverse of this concept way too much (and I hate to say it, sometimes among the same people who get that best practices aren't always best).

The inverse is, of course, "Worst Practices". Nobody ever calls them this directly, but they are implied. They stem from quotes like these: "That approach didn't work on my team, so it will never work"; or "I have seen that practice fail, therefore it always fails". To me, the concept of "worst practices" has far more negative impact on software engineering than misconstrued "best practices". It frightens me at best, and on some days, almost sickens me.

So here's what I'd like you to do. No matter how idiotic or stupid you think something sounds, the next time you are about to completely dismiss some idea, approach, technique, or anything else, stop and ask yourself "In what context would this idea, approach, concept, etc. be applicable or successful". You may actually learn something.

Connecting with the community

alanpa — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 07:01:02 GMT

Every once in a while, a strange idea pops into my head. Occasionally, I actually remember the idea for longer than a few moments. Sometimes I am even sitting at a computer - with my blog editor open when this phenomenon occurs. Of course, this isn't one of those times - I'm just letting you know that there is the potential for this to happen someday.

So, I'll share one of my bad ideas instead. I've built up a dozen or so talks over the past few years, some of which I give more often than others. These days, I'm probably more motivated to give talks that are related to the book, but I'm not limited to that subject. Unfortunately, I can't give as many in-person talks as I would like to. While I do have a few folks who are willing to fly me to their sites and buy me dinner to hear me babble for a while, I really can't afford to miss too much more work.

The punch-line, is that I'm thinking of giving some talks over the web. Most likely, the talks will be about an hour long, including Q&A. I'm not even sure what the rest of the logistics would be, but one of the things I'd like to get out of doing something like this is to just learn more about the available technology. Being a company guy, I'd likely start with Live Meeting, but I put on my tester hat and try a few other solutions as well.

What I'd need to know from you (all 8 of my readers), is if you'd be interested in attending one of these "talks" (pending your availability at the time I choose). If you are, just leave a note in the comments (anonymous is fine if you'd prefer). If not, I'll take the message to heart (and ask again in 2 months)!

HWTSAM on the Microsoft Press blog

alanpa — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 22:26:03 GMT

I almost forgot to mention that I did a guest post (including a lengthy excerpt) over on the Microsoft Press blog.

Check it out!

Inside HWTSAM – the video Podcasts

alanpa — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 03:29:21 GMT

The other authors and I are putting together a series of video casts to share a little about each chapter in How We Test Software at Microsoft.

Here’s Ken and I talking about how the book got its legs:

And here’s Ken and I talking about chapter 1.

Boulderdash review of HWTSAM

alanpa — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 03:19:03 GMT

This review is a few weeks old (yet still relevant)! Check it out.

Another HWTSAM Review

alanpa — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 23:56:26 GMT

The Evil Tester has a review of How We Test Software at Microsoft here. Here's an excerpt.

I expected more of a techniques book, instead I got a much more readable and enjoyable description of some of the testing life inside Microsoft. Plenty of stories to learn from and a description of a testing culture to aspire to.

Please keep the reviews coming (feel free to review on amazon.com as well), and send those pictures of you reading the book to alan at hwtsam dot com.