notes and rants

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...

I hate "meetings" where everyone has their head buried in a laptop. I prefer to "meet" at meetings - I can read mail or do other work just as well or better at my desk. What bothers me even more is how many people fail to mute the...

Occasionally, a pattern will emerge from the chaos in my head. Sometimes it happens slowly, and sometimes I can hear the POP as ideas converge. I was reading the braidy testers ’ posts on Myers Briggs, and it reminded me of when I took a MB test as...

I'm teaching in Vancouver, BC this week (incidentally, I think this is the first time I've taught a testing course since February or so). As usual, all of the students are smarter than me, so I try to make up for it by telling stories about testing and...

James Whittaker (author of the "How to break software" series) is now blogging . And to top it off, the guy can actually write pretty well - so well, in fact that I'll give you this short bit of advice: Add his blog to your reader / favorites...

This post comes from the “I had to share, but didn’t know who to share with” category. I’m neck deep in a research project – which means that I’m relying heavily on my search-fu to find some information. Tonight, I managed to type in a search that got...

A few weeks ago, in this post , I asked the following question: Consider the following metric, then tear it apart and make it better. Tell me what could go wrong with it, how to make it more accurate or actionable or any other way it could be improved...

What's more important, security, or quality? Of course, the answer depends entirely on context. Or, the answer could be - "Neither - the experience is most important". For me, a bad software experience is simply defined as something that didn...

I feel a little sorry for the waterfall model. Poor waterfall gets a lot of grief from the agilists – many who live in a black & white world where anything non-agile must be waterfall. I was doing some research this weekend and read this paper from...