One thing I've learned being a lead is that change takes time. And the bigger the change the longer it's going to take. Hence it follows that if your goal is to accomplish a big change in record time you had best break it into many many itty-bitty changes...

A reader writes: I am working on a client application that manipulates all sorts of COM objects. My job is to test the client application and to see if we are providing good enough support. So far I am writing test cases from the client application...

The opening keynote at STAR East this morning was James Whittaker (who I'm happy to say has joined Microsoft!) talking about security testing. James focused on three areas: Input. One common source of security bugs is unhandled/mishandled input...

Speakers at STAR East are given the opportunity to submit a paper in support of their presentation. In addition to serving as the unlive version of the presentations, the papers are judged and the best awarded Best Paper. Guess who won this year? <g...

Thanks to everyone who helped make my STAR East presentation "Hallmarks Of A Great Tester" this afternoon go off without a hitch! Speaking to five hundred people was quite experience, let me tell you. <g/> The unlive version is now up .

Mary Poppendieck opened STAR East this morning by asserting that "Your development and testing processes are defective". Mary has long been a proponent of lean software development. She maintains that if you routinely find defects during verification...

I'll be at STAR East next week. I give my talk "Hallmarks of a Great Tester" Wednesday afternoon, but I'll be there all week. If you're in the area let's meet up!

When you don't have a specification, everything's a bug . But in fact you always have a spec. Sometimes it's an honest-to-goodness document recording what your feature team decides the feature should be. Other times your spec is somewhat camouflaged....

If you have a car, truck, motorcycle, bicycle, or some other form of transportation made of metal, you know that rust is your enemy. You know that either you keep a vigilant eye out for the smallest speck of rust and eradicate posthaste each one you find...