My obsession with monitoring amazon.com sales ranks is backing off a bit (I only check a few times a day now). Sales of the book are slow but steady, but given that it's a niche market, I can't complain. I don't make any money from the book, but I still...

James Bach gave a talk at Microsoft yesterday. Among his many points, he reiterated a few points he’s been making for years that got me thinking…so I thought I’d continue the thinking in this blog post. James is concerned that Microsoft is hiring too...

Reader Ram asks: “… should an SDET be an SME in the application or be an SME in automation only or should be an SME is both application under test and automation tool? “ Full comment is here . A tester can do many things, but very few can do everything...

Today was an interesting day. Having a dose of economic reality hit close to home can be just what you need to refocus and rethink things. All is well with my team, but the weirdness of the day made me think again about what I do and how I can bring the...

It looks like our little test excellence team may be growing by one person. This is fantastic news and will help us be of better service to testers everywhere. There is a bit of bad news to go with this. Without doing a bit of reorganization in our team...

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...

Metaphors are cars – I think. There are many metaphors in software, a lot of them are useful, but most break down eventually. In hwtsam (chapter 3 to be exact), I compare creating software with cooking. I’ve mentioned on numerous occasions that ...

Bugs in software are a lot like bugs in the home. Even though you know they're there, sometimes you just don't want to know. As a tester, of course, finding bugs is part of what we do. If I were to continue the analogy, I guess if an exterminator had...

I’ve never written fiction before, but if I did, I imagine I’d start at chapter one and work straight through to the end. Something interesting about hwtsam , is that it was written out of order . This practice is common in movies and television, and...

A commenter on a previous post stated: As a programmer I don't like to see bugs (and I don't like the QA ranting about the qaulity of my work either). Could you post your "2009 advice to programmers" on how to make testers happy I’m always open...

All of sudden, it's a new year. I came to visit my parents in Eastern Washington a few days ago, and I'm still here waiting for the passes to clear up enough for me to get home. I don't feel much like working, but wanted to share a thought while I had...