I ran across a great segment of Steve Jobs talking at the WWDC in 1997 just after he returned to Apple. Similar to my post about pruning the decision tree , he speaks about the power of saying no to the bad ideas. "Focusing is about saying no," he says...

This picture says it all. The front page of Hacker News is completely dominated by the news of Steve's death. Even as someone who never owned an Apple product, he had a huge influence and raised the bar. Not just once, but at least 5 major products from...

Yesterday I wrote about the need to reduce the number of things a project attempted to do in order to deliver a great product.  Too many seemingly good ideas can make a product late or fragmented or both.  The same is true of testing a product...

A great post by Marc Randolph got me thinking.  He tackles the question of why Netflix made the moves they made recently.  Specifically, why did they spin off their DVD option as a company called Qwixter?  The answer: focus. What separates...

This week I'm attending the //build/ conference where Microsoft is revealing many of the details about Windows 8. If you want to see what is going on, follow my Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/steverowe , I'm posting some pictures, linking to summaries...

There is an old saying in software that goes something like this, “ Scope, Timeframe, and Budget: Pick two. ” Being a tester, I would rephrase this a little as, “Features, Timeframe, Budget, and Quality; Pick three”. It’s...

I'm apparently in the minority, but I really liked the sidebar in Windows Vista. On a widescreen monitor, there is horizontal space to waste and it was really convenient to have all of my gadgets showing over on the right-hand side. In Windows 7, the...

It’s been a long time since I updated my netcast list, but my habits have changed a bit.  Here is what I currently listen to regularly: This Week in Tech – Weekly Tech News Roundup GeekBrief – Daily snippet of gadget news Games with Garfield – Monthly...

It is campus hiring season and I have been reading a lot of college resumes lately.  One thing I have noticed on many resumes is that they do not list what I consider to be some of the most relevant information.  As important as it is that someone...

It seems obvious that test pass rates are important.  The higher the pass rate, the better quality the product.  The lower the pass rate, the more known issues there are and the worse the quality of the product.  It then follows that teams...

I’ve been doing a lot of interviewing lately, especially of college students. There is one tendency I see a that really separates those that are good from those who still have more learning to do. This is the tendency of the good programmers to see elegant...

I previously wrote about being intentional , but focused mostly on intentionality in execution.  Being intentional is also important in planning.  When planning a new product or the implementation of a feature, it is important to explicitly...

As the year closes I look back and see that my blogging really dropped off this past year. I intend to try to blog more over this upcoming year. My position at work has changed from a lead to a manager and that gives me a whole new perspective on things...

If you missed Stack Overflow DevDays , there is some audio from it available on Stack Overflow Podcast #71.   I wish there was a longer version of this.  It’s only about 1/2 hour of outtakes from the conference, but it is still interesting to...

A comment left on my answer to a question over on Stack Overflow has me a little worked up. I've seen this meme come out of programmers more and more and it just doesn't seem accurate. The statement goes something like this, "Design Patterns were only...

Lossless codecs are all the rage amongst those who aspire to be audiophiles.  Whether it is ripping CDs in a format like FLAC or WMA Lossless or listening the TrueHD track on Bluray movies, there are those who swear by it.   Most audio...

Six months ago I purchased a Kindle 2 .  I originally bought the Kindle to make travelling easier.  I tend to carry a lot of books with me when I take a trip and those books get heavy.  With the Kindle, I could carry just this one device...

I spent the day at Benaroya Hall for the 1st (annual?) StackOverflow DevDays conference. Overall eight speakers took the stage on topics from .Net MVC to Python to the Google App Engine. The room appears to hold just over 500 people and it was filled...

For a group of coworkers to have a chance of becoming a team, they must share a common sense of purpose or identity.  Dave Logan in Tribal Leadership calls this a “Noble Cause.”  On small teams this often comes naturally.  Everyone is working...

Some time ago I was at a management training course. The group was divided into those who were managers of managers known in this course as M2s and those who were what I have been calling leads–that is managers of individual contributors–which they called...

As one moves from being a lead (manager whose reports are individual contributors) to a manager (manager whose reports are leads), there is an important decision to be made about how to interact with your skip-level reports. That is, how should a manager...

My old manager used to always say, “Be intentional.”  It took me a long time to comprehend exactly what he meant by this, but eventually I did and have come to appreciate the advice.  What he meant was to always make active, conscious decisions...

This came out of a conversation I had today with a few other test leads.  the question was, “What are the top 5 books you should read if you want my job?”  My job in this case being that of a test development lead.  At Microsoft that means...

Learning a new programming language can affect the way you think. While most modern languages are Turing Complete and can theoretically all accomplish the same things, that’s not practically true. Each language has its own strengths of expressiveness...

A year and a half ago I tried to get to “ Inbox Zero ” and failed.  This is the idea that you get your inbox down to zero mails every day.  I’m making another run at it and this time have been a little more successful.  I’m not perfect...