Author Archives

It’s 108 today in Oklahoma City, so I find myself blogging, working indoors, and playing some guitar.I had a revelation awhile back at Five Guys Burgers. I know, for many people, revelations happen in church, during a sunset, etc. Mine happen while I’m…

Authors: Clements, Bachmann, Bass, Garlan, Ivers, Little, Merson, Nord, Stafford Addison-Wesley, 537 pages As a software tester, I rely heavily on system documentation. Unfortunately, documentation is often missing, obsolete, or never c…

Recently while teaching a workshop on Testing Dirty Systems, I uttered this “Randyism” off the top of my head, “Test automation is not automatic.” I realized immediately that I had just concisely stated the problem in making test automatio…

Name your software testing challenge and other test mangers and the workshop faculty will give you solutions!As a software test manager, you face pressure from all directions. Customers expect high-quality products, project managers want to get the …

For those of you who have been in my tutorial Becoming an Influential Test Team Leader, you know I’m big on the topic of credibility. If people don’t find you credible, they don’t find your information credible either. So, credibility is huge for teste…

Thanks everyone for your kind words about my lightning keynote today at StarEast.Here is the complete script: 10. Set unreasonable “stretch” goals just to see how hard people will work.It really doesn’t matter what the goals are, or what…

Thanks to everyone who attended my half-day tutorial today! Here are the tools that were mentioned by people in the session, plus a few more from me:Axiom – Requirements Management tool – http://www.iconcur-software.com/solutions.htmlDia (Visio alterna…

For many years, when software projects failed, the vendors almost always had to pay up big time. Well…it looks like the taxpayers in Minnesota are getting stuck with a $7.25 million bill on this one. Why? Basically, the judgment was that the state al…

I found this on Computerworld’s Shark Tank and thought about the old “Who’s on First?” bit. It’s also a great example of trying to understand the users’ true needs and expectations of software. “He (Big Boss) wanted me to help him understand how Micros…

I have a great interest in the topic of software defects, their impact and how software failures happen. Books in the past such as “The Day the Phones Stopped”, “Bad Software” and “Fatal Defect” have been great sources of documenting what has gone wron…