In the spring of 2008, I was privileged to chat with Jerry Weinberg on why he was favouring CAST with his only conference appearance of that year, other than the Amplifying Your Effectiveness conference, of which he’s a co-founder and host. CAST that year saw the launch of Jerry’s book Perfect Software and Other Illusions About Testing. It’s now available as an e-book, too. Jerry will not, so far as … Read more
The PDF file linked here is a transcript of a conversation over Skype, New Year’s Eve (December 31), 2010. The conversation was prompted by a Twitter exchange on exploratory testing (ET) started by Andy Glover, who observed that “When developing scripts you need to explore. But this tends to be exploring with out the s/w so I would say it’s not ET.: I disagree; developing scripts is test design, and … Read more
In the last posting, I remarked on some of the people with whom I chatted with at EuroSTAR, and whom I’m seeing as emerging leaders in a community of skilled testers. Here are a few more. Lynn McKee (Twitter: @lynn_mckee on Twitter) gave an inspiring and very well-attended talk on how to instill passion in testers—and in how to respect and defend the passion that’s there. Lynn walks her talk; … Read more
Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like … Read more
In 1996, I was working as a program manager for Quarterdeck, which at the time produced some of the best-selling utility software on the market. I took a three-day in-house training class that quite literally changed the course of my life. That class was the Black Box Software Testing course, by Cem Kaner. Unlike anyone else that I was aware of at the time, Cem was writing and talking about … Read more
So the holidays are coming up, and you’re wondering what to get for your tester friends, or (if you’re a tester) for your kids. Let me be the first this season to recommend I Am A Bug, a perfectly charming little book by Robert Sabourin, and illustrated by his daughter Catherine, who was between 11 and 12 years old as the book was being published. It’s been around for several … Read more
I’m delighted to have been asked to present a lunchtime talk at the Kitchener-Waterloo Software Quality Association, Wednesday September 30. I’ll be giving a reprise of my STAR East keynote talk, What Haven’t You Noticed Lately? Building Awareness in Testers. (The title has been pinched from Mark Federman, who got it from Terence McKenna, who may have got it from Marshall McLuhan, but maybe not.) The following week, it’s STAR … Read more
This may just be my all-time favourite error message: Note that the promulgator of the message doesn’t identify itself (the caption bar is helpfully labelled “DLL”); that the program to be loaded isn’t identified; that the format isn’t identified; that what you might do to fix the problem isn’t identified… Oh, and by the way… a little detective work shows that it comes from Adobe Acrobat.
I just spent $3,000 to get my nose fixed, and then I found out it was my tie that was crooked. —Steve Shrott There’s a piece of software development mythodology that suggests that it’s always more expensive to fix a problem late in the development process rather than early. Usually the ratios quoted are fantastic; a hundred to one, a thousand to one, ten thousand to one. Let’s put that … Read more
At about the 10-minute mark in this video (from 1968) Marshall McLuhan refers to an expression that he claimed was then in use at IBM: “Information overload leads to pattern recognition.” This is central to the idea of what blink testing is all about. He also describes characteristics of the scientist’s mindset vs. the artist’s mindset, which reminded me of similar patterns that we might see in programmers and testers. … Read more