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

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

James Bach reports on a statement allegedly made by Yaron Sinai, the CEO of Elementool, and Joseph Ours comments. In light of Joseph’s comment, I too wonder if Elementool was tested by human testers under the control of their own process. Perhaps it was tested by testers who strictly followed the steps, which Mr. Sinai apparently suggested was all that was necessary. If the latter, then Joseph’s experience can be … Read more

Perusing my Blogger page, I suddenly realize that I never posted this final wrap-up to my original observations on IMVU and its 50-deployments-a-day approach, plus the comments here, here, here, and here. In addition to his Quality is Dead article, James has added his perspective on IMVU specifically. Is there a problem at IMVU? As an outsider, is this any of my business anyway? I think so, at least to … Read more