Michael Bolton I was at STAR East this past week, giving a tutorial, a track session, and a keynote. I dropped in on a few of the other sessions, but at breaks I kept finding myself engaged in conversation with individuals and small groups, such that I often didn’t make it to the next session. At STAR, like many conferences, the track presentations tend to be focused on someone’s proposed solution to … Read more
At the QUEST conference in Chicago, April 22 2009, I gave a presentation on recording and reporting for exploratory testers. You can find the presentation notes here. You can also read a more formal paper on the subject, prepared for the 2007 Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference, here. Both documents include material on notebooks and on Session-Based Test Management, and a bunch of other stuff besides.
I’ll be at STAR East Monday, May 4 through May 7 2009. Lots of other colleagues will be there too, including James Bach, Jonathan Kohl, Rob Sabourin, Karen Johnson, and James Lyndsay. I’ll be presenting a keynote talk, “What Haven’t You Noticed Lately: Building Awareness in Testers” (the title there was cheerfully lifted by me from Mark Federman, who cheerfully lifted it from Terence Gordon, who either lifted or channeled … Read more
“Nice.. so Michael want us to buy his book .. maybe that why he have his web adress in his comments 🙂 Michael we did talk to the Ladies, and if you did the same you would know it’s fixed. Yes there was a mistake, but it’s fixed. If you want adverts for you book pls go to the papers or google adwords. There will come names, faces ect. We … Read more
A few blog posts back, I tried to emphasize the relative importance of skilled people over documentation by remarking that commercial airlines “tend to have a captain and a first officer in the cockpit, rather than a pilot and a book on how to fly an aircraft”. “Tend to” was intended to understate the case; as Rob remarks below, you’ll see single pilots only on very small planes (like the … Read more
This post is here only as a matter of historical record. Eventually, the bad guys go away. Related to my post about the World Agile Testing Qualifications Board, on March 31, I posted the following discussion on the WAQB LinkedIn list: Linkedin Groups March 31, 2009 World Agile Qualifications Board – WAQB Today’s Activity: 1 discussion Discussions (1) Does anyone /know/ anything about the World Agile Qualifications Board? 1 comment … Read more
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, Quarterdeck Office Systems (later Quarterdeck Corporation)—a company for whom I worked—was in the business of creating multitasking and memory management products to extend and enhance to Microsoft’s DOS operating system. The ideas that our programmers developed were so good and so useful that similar ideas were typically adopted by Microsoft and folded into DOS a year or so later. After each new version of … Read more
The World Agile Qualifications Board should be seen as an embarrassment even to regular peddlers of certification. The WAQB has apparently been established recently—but when? By whom? There is a Web site. I hesitate to link to it, because I don’t want people to see it… but on the other hand, I do want people to see it, so that they can observe from the outset how these things work. … Read more
Scott Berkun has an interesting post on requirements, and why they’re problemmatic. He says that “data collection” isn’t the issue. I agree with that. He also refers to “requirements gathering” (to me, not so good) and “requirements definition” (a little better, perhaps). I like to think of this whole business not as requirements gathering, but as requirements development. (I credit Ian Heppell for pointing this out to me, but I … Read more
In a blog post on The Test Eye, Martin Jansson has some things to say about the dangers of The Indispensable Worker. The post is worth reading. I commented there, and do a somewhat better job of it here: Your point about indispensability is well-taken. In workshops that I’ve attended, Jerry Weinberg has often pointed out the urgency of getting rid of the problem of indispensability. If someone appears to … Read more