Testing Testing 1,2,3

Photographers@Microsoft 2009

2009-10-01T07:16:53Z

Check out this book! This year fellow Microsofties who are photographer nuts from around the world spent five months assembling and publishing a world-class, fine art photo book. The time and talent that went into this project makes every copy of the book a gift to its owner. And guess what, one of my photos actually made it into the book. Here is the full book preview online (160 pages of preview!). I should mention that if you purchase the book, 100% of the profit from sales...(read more)

Session Based Testing

2009-03-11T21:21:43Z

As I was planning to do a team-wide presentation on Session Based Testing, I just thought I might as well use this opportunity to blog and share my own learning on Session Based Testing and at the same time prepare for the talk. Killing 1 bird with two stones has been one of my repertoires (wait a minute….). I do apologize in advance that I am not able to share out the actual slides since it contains some Microsoft Confidential data. But I’ll do my best to summarize the main point...(read more)

And the Oscar goes to… Live Search!

2009-02-24T01:58:00Z

That is a pretty bold blog title and absolutely had nothing to do with the Oscar itself. But I had very little time last night to watch Oscar, and was somewhat curious about the winners and losers. So I hit up Google and use this search term “Oscar”. Here is the front page search results. Seems pretty plain old Googley. So then I got curious and want to see how Live Search is doing. And here is what is shown on the front page. Immediately, all the major winner results are displayed, which is exactly...(read more)

Email Address test cases

2009-02-06T10:27:00Z

I've been on many teams in my whole testing career, and for some reason, I always end up getting assigned to validate the email address field. So after numerous times of hunting down my old email test cases from previous team, I am giving up. I thought I am just going to list out all of them here out on the internet. I know that I probably going to have to refer to this list again and again in the future. Might as well help benefit others like me. Here is the list of valid and invalid email format...(read more)

Software development process

2008-11-25T08:51:44Z

1) Order t-shirts for the development team 2) Announce the release date 3) Write the code 4) Write the manual 5) Hire a PM 6) PM spec the software based on the code (to ensure the software meets the specifications) 7) Ship/Launch 8) Test with real users (free) 9) Bugs are potential enhancements 10) Announce the upgrade Is your team practicing this?...(read more)

Exploring “Exploratory Testing”

2008-10-02T08:12:53Z

My current team has been integrating this testing technique for a while now along with the traditional testing methods of manual testing as well as automation. Most of the testing community that I have known seem to brush this testing technique off simply as “monkey testing” which doesn’t really provide any significant yield on bugs nor achieve high quality bugs. However, I have been observing how powerful this testing method can be from my own perspective as well as by seeing the type...(read more)

Help! I found a bug in my code

2008-07-28T21:19:00Z

Okay, after a long sabbatical from writing blogs due to various reasons (over-worked, personal reasons, or just plain lazy), I am about to begin start blogging again. My MSDN blog ranking has taken such an embarrassing tumble that I think I need to start hustling up again. So, to welcome myself back to blogosphere, what better way than to show off a bug in my code? I just found it this morning, in plain sight. Okay, I know this is pretty lame, and probably not the first picture of a “bug” in the...(read more)

Code of the day: while(!asleep()) { sheep++; }

2008-03-05T23:00:00Z

Stumbled upon this great one liner off Bash.org (via Reddit ) just moments ago. Made me LOL....(read more)

Y HALO THAR WURLD

2008-02-11T10:51:51Z

Today was an eye opener for me. When I browsed through my Flickr account, I happened to notice the greetings-in-different-language on my Flickr home page. You know the usual phrases "Kumusta ch4n!" (Tagalog), or "Hola ch4n!" (Spanish), or "Bonjour ch4n!" (French), etc. etc. However, I noticed something different today on that greeting. "OH HAI ch4n!". I just subconciously thought at first that's how Chinese greet one another, but then on second thought, that's actually not Chinese. That got me to...(read more)

2¹/2²/2³

2008-02-04T12:52:00Z

Today is meant to be the power of two's day. 2¹ => 2 2² => 4 2³ => 8 Putting together make 2/4/8 => 2/4/08. Of course, back home in Asia and possibly in other places around the globe today is actually 2²/2¹/2³ which isn't as interesting. k. 'nuff nerdinous for the day....(read more)

Bill Gates The Software Tester

2008-01-23T09:06:56Z

This year is going to be a memorable one since it's the last year that Bill is going to be with us 'softie full time. In light of the upcoming retirement, I decided to read on his bio just to learn a bit more about him. What I found out was somewhat amazing, especially his childhood years. According to this Wikipedia entry (and also here and this book here ), it seemed that our dear BillG actually started off his initial experience with computer as a <drum roll> tester! Oh and he was a good...(read more)

D200 Photo shoot

2007-12-17T04:10:00Z

Some off topic from software testing here (as if I have a lot of 'on-topic', but well...). Yesterday, a few friends and I decided to go crazy and wander around town for a quick photo shooting session. The weather was cranky (cloudy and off-n-on drizzle) and cold, but since I just got a hand on my newest toy ( D200 + VR 18-200mm zoom lens + 50mm f1.8 lens), I just had to go and test drive them out. We ventured off back to Amazon.com HQ up on Beacon hill, where I was hoping to get a glimpse of the...(read more)

Thank you Dr. Randy Pausch

2007-09-21T10:11:00Z

I have always enjoyed watching motivational speakers giving out some speeches or tips on how to err... be motivated in life, or help others stay motivated, or maybe motivate others. But most of the time the content of those speeches would stay with me for about a day, two at most, and then I would simply forget. There's something different today. I came across an article about a CMU professor, Dr. Randy Pausch , who's terminally ill with cancer (he sure doesn't look like it). The professor gave his...(read more)

Software Testing Forum from MSDN

2007-09-12T08:42:00Z

I have been wondering for as long as I can remember why MSFT doesn't have a centralized forum for software testing. But today, it seemed that testing god has answered that question as I happened to stumble upon this MSDN Software Testing Discussing Forum . Although it seemed that the forum had just been started up quite recently, but the testing community both internal and external are growing quite rapidly. Here's the excerpt of the goal of this forum: "The goal is to create a community that answers...(read more)

Dear Digg, your Sony ad is killing my browser

2007-09-11T09:39:00Z

I considered this evening to be pretty special for me -- it's one of those rare days where I could have dinner peacefully all by myself. Not that I enjoyed eating dinner alone, but sometimes what a geek man wants is simply quiet time with a computer. :D At least that's what I thought to be until I notice that my CPU consumption start revving when I surfed through fine news aggregator site like Digg . I'm pretty sure I have nothing running in the background at all. I'm staring at the CPU meter in...(read more)