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Magic Numbers: Integers

After many moons of sitting in a queue somewhere, the MSDN Tester Center just posted my intro article on special numbers you probably want to think about when running tests. The paper addresses several interesting domains of integers (all the way up to Read More...
Posted Friday, October 09, 2009 10:37 AM by joshpoley | 0 Comments
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Test Plan Template

While looking at some of the traffic statistics for the MSDN Tester Center , I noticed that a bunch of people arrived at the site as a result of doing a Google search for "test plan template". The primary starting point for a template is really the IEEE Read More...
Posted Friday, October 02, 2009 10:51 AM by joshpoley | 0 Comments
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The Brute Tester

A co-worker of mine was working on a tool to watch our release share for the appearance of a test result file, for which he would then publish up to a TFS server. The "trx" results file in question is actually being created on the Xbox console by our Read More...
Posted Monday, June 01, 2009 10:47 AM by joshpoley | 0 Comments
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Crashed Conference Room (ɯooɹ)

So we have these fancy touch screen displays on the outside of our conference rooms which will tell us when the room is booked (and by whom). They are definitely handy as they help resolve the inevitable conflict when multiple groups arrive at the same Read More...
Posted Thursday, May 21, 2009 7:27 AM by joshpoley | 0 Comments
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Upcoming Testing Conferences (2nd half of 2009)

Here is my semiannual post on testing conferences that will be occurring later this year. CAST July 13 - July 16 Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA ISSTA July 19 - July 23 Chicago, Illinois, USA softec July 20 - July 22 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia STANZ August Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 13, 2009 10:20 AM by joshpoley | 1 Comments
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Finding Database Connection Strings

For a simple tool I was working on I needed to talk to a Microsoft Access database from my program. Now, most of the database work I've done in the past has been against SQL Server, so I needed to dig up the magic voodoo which represents the "connection Read More...
Posted Thursday, May 07, 2009 9:04 AM by joshpoley | 0 Comments
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Communication is Optional

Clear communication is essential to our jobs and yet it always amazes me how poorly we do it. I received this chart in an email (about stress results). Now, the interesting part: I've just given you as much context as to the meaning of the chart (and Read More...
Posted Tuesday, April 14, 2009 2:41 PM by joshpoley | 1 Comments
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Top 25 software errors

SANS, along with a coalition of individuals and software organizations, just released their list of top " 25 most dangerous programming errors ". There has been some talk of making these a "requirement" or some sort of logo program to help protect customers Read More...
Posted Monday, January 12, 2009 8:41 AM by joshpoley | 0 Comments
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New Black Book

Before the holidays, there was a big re-organization of personnel here in Xbox land. As a result, I figured that this would be a good time to update my Black Book and have some more copies printed out for all the folks which are now a part of our new-and-improved Read More...
Posted Wednesday, January 07, 2009 10:22 AM by joshpoley | 1 Comments
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MiniDumps and "Bad" Stacks

A fellow reader sent a comment outlining the following problem: I'm using the DMPSTK example from the Debugging Tools SDK. If I generate a crash dump from within Visual Studio 2005, I can see the call stack perfectly. However, if I create my own crash Read More...
Posted Monday, November 10, 2008 8:07 AM by joshpoley | 0 Comments
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Upcoming Testing Conferences (1st half of 2009)

Here are the links and dates for some of the testing related conferences which are approaching. Future Test February 24 - February 25 New York, New York, USA Swiss Testing Day March 18 Zürich, Switzerland ANZTB March 23 - March 25 Sydney, Australia SEPG Read More...
Posted Tuesday, November 04, 2008 8:56 AM by joshpoley | 1 Comments
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New Xbox Experience

This blog has been pretty quiet for a while since we've been busy doing the last push getting the " New Xbox Experience " polished and ready for release later this month. The new UI is pretty cool and is a nice break from the "Blade" interface which I've Read More...
Posted Monday, November 03, 2008 8:33 AM by joshpoley | 0 Comments
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Off to StarWest

I'm off at StarWest , so the blog will be a bit quieter this week. If you happen to be in Anaheim, look for the pale bald guy. Read More...
Posted Monday, September 29, 2008 8:13 AM by joshpoley | 1 Comments
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Save My Image File's Metadata

The relatively new " Metadata Working Group " just released their first publication on guidelines for making the metadata stored in image files more portable across applications and file formats. Ever since I started photographing with a Digital SLR camera, Read More...
Posted Thursday, September 25, 2008 8:03 AM by joshpoley | 0 Comments
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Running 32bit dependent scripts in a 64bit world

As seen earlier , it can be problematic to run scripts which rely on 32bit COM objects on a 64bit platform. To make things easier, I wrote basic some script code to detect that the wrong scripting host was run and fork out to the correct one. This just Read More...
Posted Thursday, September 18, 2008 10:44 AM by joshpoley | 1 Comments
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