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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...