Michael Bolton

In the Agile-Testing list, Kevin Lawrence says “I share in the fantasy that my business people will write tests and am jealous of those who have turned fantasy into reality but, alas, I have not shared that experience.“ Wanting business people to write tests, to me, feels like a cook wanting the restaurant’s patrons to sauté their own mushrooms. Dear Madam Business Person, I don’t want to stop you writing … Read more

“Quality is value to some person.” —Jerry Weinberg In the agile-testing mailing list, Steven Gordon says “The reality is that meeting the actual needs of the market beats quality (which is why we observe so many low quality systems surviving in the wild). Get over it. Just focus on how to attain the most quality we can while still delivering fast enough to discover, evolve and implement the right requirements … Read more

Arianna Huffington, on the Daily Show, suggested that one point of the blog was to work out nascent ideas without being overly concerned about completeness. There are a bunch of things that are rattling around at the moment, from all kinds of different sources. One is The Sciences of the Artificial, by Herbert Simon—a book that James Bach has been recommending to me practically forever. I’m finally getting around to … Read more

With apologies to James Taylor, I’m going to Carolina, and not merely in my mind. The Triangle Information Systems Quality Association (TISQA) will present Agile Testing In The Carolinas, March 16th and 17th, 2009, at The Friday Center, Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The first day is a day of keynotes, conference sessions, and networking; the second is dedicated to half- and full-day workshops. Featured speakers include Shaun Bradshaw, T.R. Buskirk, … Read more

For the last five years or so, I’ve been living with my wife, Mary Alton, a talented artist and interface designer. And for the last six years or so, we’ve been waiting for a time when we were both free to start updating the look, feel, and content of my increasingly antique- and clunky-looking Web site (either she’s had too much work with paying clients, or I have… and then … Read more

Silver bullets kill the vampires. The problem is not that there are no silver bullets. There are silver bullets—or if there aren’t any, you could make them fairly straightforwardly. The problems are Silver bullets are expensive, especially considering… There are no vampires. In our business, the problems that we have involve regular people, and there’s a long history that shows that bullets of any kind, whether in guns or PowerPoint … Read more

My colleague and friend Erik Petersen talks about bug clusters a lot. (I’ll get to discussing Black Swans in this space later, but I’m obliged to point out here that I disagree with Erik; I would argue that neither most bugs nor exploratory testing are black swans as he suggests.) I’ve been wanting to respond to the discussion for a while, and I think enough time has passed that I’m … Read more

I got some mail in the inbox recently from Qualtech, the organizers EuroSTAR 2008. The message was that Two Futures of Software Testing, one of my presentations, not only won the CapGemini Award for Innovation, but was also the highest-rated track session at the conference. That’s very gratifying; to both the conference participants and Qualtech, thank you for the honour. Qualtech also asked me to write a follow-up piece, which … Read more

Yesterday, Nestor Arellano from ITWorld Canada, an online publication, called me and sent an email, seeking comment on a press release about the Top 25 Programming Errors. I glanced at the list of errors that he had sent me, and it seemed to me that they had missed the most important programming error of all: failing to ask if the program does something useful or valuable, and failing to consider … Read more