Test Guide

Yes, I saw that movie in the theater when it first came out, before it was cool. That's not really relevant though. Or maybe it is, since I've worked in plenty of Office Spacey places that would have completely freaked if I even thought about making my...

What is quality to you? How do you measure quality? When is quality accomplished? If you don't know how your customers would answer these questions, your product probably doesn't meet their needs as well as it could. You can fix this problem. But first...

When Jeffrey Richter - who has been consulting to Microsoft lo these many years - talks about "Controversial .Net Topics", anyone who is interested in .Net sits up and listens. The first topic Jeffrey talked about is protecting intellectual property....

Any session that starts with the comment "All examples in this talk represent things you should NEVER do" has to be good! This morning Dan Appleman explained his views regarding "Why did they do that?", where "they" refers to the designers of Microsoft...

Refactoring I'm familiar with. Ken Pugh I'm familiar with. Ken Pugh talking about prefactoring sounded interesting. And it was! You may not know what prefactoring is. I didn't. Ken defines prefactoring as "developing code that reduces the need to refactor...

First up today: Elisabeth Hendrickson discussing how in the world testing can survive in an Agile world. After all, Test traditionally uses all that time it takes Dev to give us something useful to write and review test plans, test specs, and test cases...

Scott Meyers . A standing room only crowd. Scott Meyers. Eight hours of Scott Meyers. Fun! Scott's all-day tutorial was titled "Better Software -- No Matter What". To summarize in a single sentence: quality is important. No surprise, right? The reason...

Today I'm attempting an all-day tutorial: Better Software -- No Matter What. Speaking is Scott Meyers , author of the classic Effective C++ book series . Scott is always entertaining and never pulls his punches, so this should be a fun day. Unfortunately...

By the bye, the official SD blog is at http://sdexpo.blogspot.com/ . I'm cross-posting there, but for every session I go to there are ten-plus more I had to decide weren't quite as interesting, so there is lots more there for your virtual head-stuffing...

This afternoon was a half-day tutorial on exploratory testing. Elisabeth Hendrickson gave an engaging talk - complete with in-class exploratory testing - that presented four techniques for doing successful exploratory testing: variables (anything whose...

I'm at Software Development West this week. My brain always hurts by the end of the week (this is my eighth SD) but right now that pain is far off. First up is a half-day tutorial on Domain Driven Design presented by Eric Evans (author of the book by...

Mark asks: So how *do* you find tester-developers? Certainly a job description that says "QA" seems to be an invitation for lots of resumes from script-followers. I want people who think repetetive tasks are what computers are for, not people, and that...

Recently I read through the notes from Brett Pettichord's workshop on Homebrew Test Automation . It's a great overview of available test automation techniques, although it is old enough that he doesn't mention UIAutomation (the Longhorn replacement for...