notes and rants

I have been thinking about “niche” professions – those that only appeal to a relatively small number of people in the world. Often, these professions are looked down upon by those in similar professions – or by those who don’t know much about the profession...

In music, the better you are at the basics, the better you are on the bandstand. Even the pro musicians I know practice almost every day. I think testers (and developers) forget the value of practice too often. In The Passionate Programmer, Chad Fowler...

aka – The secrets of my so called success, part 23. It’s Tuesday after a long weekend, and my todo list is long. The good news is that I know exactly how long it is, since (for better or for worse), I let outlook drive my daily schedule. Since I’ve mentioned...

On request from Adam Goucher – another excerpt from How We Test Software at Microsoft .  BTW – Adam wrote a review of HWTSAM here – although Linda Wilkinson beat him to the clever title . This is from a section on quality in chapter 16. It’s something...

Although my anniversary is coming up, this post is about another “L” word: Leadership. “Senior” people at Microsoft (and I assume at other companies) are expected to exhibit it. This is true for managers and non-managers alike (because, of course, management...

Phil Kirkham recently posted a list of 7 Influential Books and encouraged some of his fellow bloggers to follow suit. Of course, Phil’s list overlaps mine, so instead, I’d like to present: 7 Influential Books that Phil doesn’t Mention The Feiner Points...

I’ve run into more and more people lately who are astounded that software ships with known bugs. I’m frightened that many of these people are software testers and should know better. First, read this “old” (but good) article from Eric Sink. I doubt I...

My travel always comes in flurries, and October is the flurry month for this year. Immediately following a personal trip (brother in-law’s wedding), I’ll be heading to STAR . (btw – if you’re thinking of attending, you can use the promo code SKWS when...

I took an opportunity to write some code last week. I’ll spare you the full background – short story is that the school my kids go to needed a small web app written. It ended up  being 100 lines or so of javascript and about 3 lines of html. The...

I had a bit of a surreal experience this week. One of the groups I work with sent some mail asking me to review an internal report. They noticed an issue and had made some changes. I checked out the report, but it was incorrect. I let them know and got...

Heusser is sad because his heroes haven’t been blogging lately (two of those have only blogged 2-3 times in the last year , so I’m not sure what he’s missing there). The good news is that there’s plenty of great writing on test (and some great writing...