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On August 5, 2005, James Bach posted in his blog a really interesting piece on intermittent problems. It’s, as usual, thoughtful and well-considered. You can read it at http://www.satisfice.com/blog/archives/34. It’s a little agonizing to think that an intermittent problem might depend upon achieving a certain threshold value in some variable which might be difficult to reach. One form of intermittent problem might require hundreds of thousands of preceding transactions. This … Read more

Over the last little while, I’ve been corresponding fairly frequently on the Agile Testing mailing list. You can find it yourself at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/agile-testing. It’s a stimulating, but sometimes frustrating forum. The Agile movement itself (and its most prominent sect, eXtreme Programming, or XP) seem heavily oriented towards developer-centric concerns. That’s fair enough. However, the forum’s mandate confuses me: the charter states that the forum “…is not a group to discuss … Read more

Since my January 24 post, I’ve discovered three bugs in UltimateBB. (Well, maybe. Rapid Testing holds two definitions of “bug”: a) “anything that threatens the value of the product” and b) “anything that bugs somebody who matters”. Under definition (a), these qualify as bugs. I reckon I don’t really matter, so under (b), maybe they don’t qualify as bugs. But I digress.) 1) After entering a message (in the arbitrarily … Read more

I get perverse joy in finding bugs on testing and QA-related sites. Here’s one from QAForums. Apparently none of the 106,000 members has noticed the bug, or if they’ve reported it, nothing’s been done. Note that, not only is the “grand_total Quality Assurance Links” tag unknown, but the word “unknown” is spelled wrong.

It occurs to me this evening that when test plans, test scripts, and testers look for particular problems with excessive focus, they do so at the expense of peripheral vision.

Tonight I went to a local, large, spruced-up grocery store that’s part of the a large Canadian grocery store chain called “Dominion”. (Update, 2011:  Dominion is no more; it’s now part of a consolidated chain called “Metro”.)  The store is a short drive away, but it is open 24 hours, which is dead handy when you have an infant in the house. There’s a great selection of products, mostly at reasonable … Read more

I was trying to squeeze my car into a space that was too small, next to the curb, a couple of weeks back. I was trying to avoid blocking the driveway in front of me. As I backed up, the bumper of my car touched (and I mean touched) the bumper of a Jeep Cherokee behind me. He had lots of space behind him, and was taking up much more … Read more

Well… here it is. Welcome to the blog.