Machine lockdown purgatory
in Everything, Software Testing
as security lockdown, Testing
Clearly I’ve had it far too easy for the past 10 years. Working for internet-based companies with unfettered access to install whatever I like on my machine, all the internets I could eat, complete control over my testing environment(s). I have a question for all of you who have in the past experienced complete machine [...]
What’s in a word?
in Everything, Software Testing
as educating management about testing, misconceptions about testing, Testing
It’s funny how one word can have multiple meanings. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately in relation to learning Japanese, and especially Japanese grammar where identical grammatical structures can have quite different meanings depending on context. There’s also an English word that’s been bugging me a bit lately. The word ‘just’ can be [...]
Alpha, Beta and gods willing, Omega
Jeff Atwood recently wrote a post about phases of software development/release. He wondered where the terms come from and why we rarely use ‘gamma’ – I wondered if these terms actually have any relevance to what actually goes on in software development anymore. To me, these terms are used to broadly group stages of software [...]
Be a better tester – do something else
If you want to be an extremely effective software tester, I highly recommend you do something else. Really. I’m not talking about being able to complete Halo3 in world-record time. Specifically I mean you should find something that you are passionate about; that takes practice and perseverance to become proficient in, and then master it. [...]
Repetition begets skill…however
In testing, I think there is a tendency to confuse repetition for the purpose of learning with repetition as the application of skill. I have heard that some expound using scripts as a means of skilling up unskilled staff. I believe this thinking is fundamentally flawed. The reason being is that there is no clear [...]
tadaima
So I’m back from CAST. Yes, I know I haven’t finished writing up my notes from the CITCON event. I had every intention of doing so on the trip home, but 30 hours stuck in planes and transit lounges with screaming children, people with questionable personable hygiene and vapid narcissists who need to share with [...]
CITCON Melbourne 2008 – Initial thoughts and impressions
So CITCON is done and dusted. I met a lot of really interesting people, some of them doing some very cool stuff. Saturday turned out to be a long-ish day and quite a fruitful one. I’m going to break down some of the stuff I picked up in the five sessions that I attended in [...]
Tester Advocacy Part 3 – Is productivity a measure of value?
There has been an interesting thread going on in the yahoo software testing group to which I subscribe. The topic began as a discussion about software development as art, but was quickly shoehorned into a discussion about productivity. Jared Quinert blogged a response to this recently which got me thinking again about tester advocacy. I [...]
Rotation – An effective way of providing long-term support
I hesitate to say that I’ve been sitting on this post for a while. Let’s just say I’ve been giving it some thought. At my current place of work, because we host our product online the testers, beyond testing the code pre-release necessarily have to have to support this code once it goes live. This [...]
CITCON – Continuous integration and testing conference
I’m going to be attending CITCON coming up in Melbourne at the end of June. There will be a bunch of people from all different tech areas to discuss CI and the testing thereof. It’s an ‘OpenSpace‘ format, so I’m looking forward to seeing what sort of things people want to discuss and hear about. [...]