notes and rants

On nearly half of the international flights I take, something bad happens with software. That’s not as scary as it sounds – I’m talking about the entertainment software that lets we watch edited movies on a 6 inch screen with sound on 2 dollar headphones...

I’m heading out from a busy 4 days in Munich. I had a wonderful time, and had fun with all of my presentations. The people at Siemens took fantastic care of me. My hosts made sure that I had absolutely everything I needed, and the the audience was...

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...

I'm heading off to Munich, Germany (is there another Munich?) later this month. The main point of the trip is to give some presentations at Siemens, but I'll also be stopping by a recent Microsoft acquisition to talk to them a bit about the mother ship...

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...

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...

As some of you know, I'm giving a talk at STAR East on metrics (specifically, I think it's something to do with choosing ship metrics). My presentation is in the highly coveted "last track session time slot of the conference" slot. Luckily,...

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

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.