Michael Bolton

If anyone asks me what general systems thinking is about, I will from henceforth point them to any Jessica Hagy index card that has an X/Y chart with an -OR- in the caption. Or I may just point everyone to it anyway. This stuff is absolutely wonderful. http://indexed.blogspot.com/ and also http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/indexed/ Note that I spared you the by-now obligatory reminder to register for the CAST Conference. Oh, damn!–no I didn’t.

I’ll be doing a presentation called “Six Short Talks About Software Testing” for the Toronto Association of System and Software Quality (TASSQ) on Tuesday evening, May 27, 2008. It’ll be a 90-minute session wherein I’ll give of a six set of lightning talks, with time for questions between each one and a longer discussion afterwards. I’ll be using a few of those minutes to talk about the CAST Conference, July … Read more

The Conference for the Association for Software Testing 2008 is coming up, July 14-16 in Toronto. The theme is “Interdisciplinary Approaches to Software Testing”. It’s an absolutely terrific program, featuring keynotes by Jerry Weinberg, Cem Kaner, Rob Sabourin, and Brian Fisher; tutorials by Jerry, Scott Barber, Hung Nguyen, and Julian Harty; and a dozen-or-so track sessions. You can read all about that part here: http://www.cast2008.org/Program. As usual for CAST, the … Read more

Until today, my reading of Mary Reilly’s Play As Exploratory Learning had been limited to occasional stolen glances into Cem Kaner’s library, but a copy of this out-of-print book arrived today. Browsing (that is, a little exploratory reading) yielded this (from Chapter 3, “An Explanation of Play”, page 117): “The pursuit of the rumored goodness and usefulness that play might have for man is plagued by the difficulties inherent in … Read more

Jason Gorman is an interesting guy, and has a lot to say. I agree with lots of it, especially his iconoclastic position on agilism. This time, I’d like to disagree with two paragraphs in a recent blog entry. The second one first. But I suspect in 5-10 years’ time, as test-driven development becomes more popular and teams become more ambitious in their testing efforts, test developers will be in great … Read more

Here’s a heuristic: when someone is describing (or, especially, dissing) some practice or methodology, don’t bother taking them seriously unless they know the difference between tenants and tenets. Examples abound.

Over the last few months, I’ve been wrestling with a book called Sensemaking in Organizations, by Karl Weick. I’ve got bogged down in it from time to time, but it’s fascinating. Weick describes sensemaking as having seven properties: it’s grounded in constructing or enhancing the identity of an individual or group; it’s retrospective, or based on “meaningful lived experience”; it’s “enactive of sensible environments”, which is kind of circular; it … Read more

I know little of Sir Geoffrey Vickers, but I read a quote recently that made me want to find out more. In Play as Exploratory Learning, by Mary Reilly, he is quoted as saying, In these days when the rich in knowledge eat such specialized food at such separate tables, only the dogs have a chance of a balanced diet. That’s a gorgeous reminder about interdisciplinary thinking. And that reminds … Read more

This year’s Conference for the Association for Software Testing will be held in Toronto, Ontario, July 14-16, 2008. Jerry Weinberg is our first announced keynote speaker, with others to come. The theme of the conference is “Beyond the Boundaries: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Software Testing”. CAST is a different kind of conference. It is, to a great degree, a scaled-up version of the LAWST-style workshops initiated by Cem Kaner and Brian … Read more