I found myself writing this in my one of my CS Classes, today, and thought I would share it here: AI Coding is an interesting problem. I am old enough […]
A new test challenge!
Today is Thursday, July 24, 2025, and it’s time we did something fun, isn’t it? I’ve been in a debate recently if my website, XNDEV.COM, is useful for test challenges. […]
What happens when this stuff doesn’t work?
Thanks to the internet, people in software delivery seem to actually remember the last decade or two of history, and are less bound to repeat and reinvent it. Yet the […]
Ten Thoughts on Technical Debt
Back in 2008 I organized a peer conference on Technical Debt at Calvin College along with Pat Bailey, Steve Poling, and Michael Kelly. Sponsored by the Agile Alliance, the event […]
The (lack of?) Evidence for Klarna’s use of AI
I’d like to present an alternative perspective on AI for software development, using Klarna as an example. Klarna If we had to pick one company touted as the earliest adopter […]
A new turing test
It’s been a odd couple of years. Take this post on linkedin from last week: The meta-point the author is trying to make is that testing is always testing, and […]
A Quick bit on why/what Scrum improved
One of my students recently asked me: Is Scrum actually useful? Many developers I’ve heard from have had negative experiences with it, and I’m curious about whether it’s more effective […]
Agile Alliance/PMI Partnership?
Too long/did not read version: The people-people took over the label Agile, as they do. The Sound Craftspeople, as always, have work to do. It’s time for us to get […]
On Truth
After a wonderful talk with Michael Larsen at #PNSQC, I do feel compelled to make a statement. That is to say, something like this: I got into testing at least […]
Jokes, Parables and Videos
A few years ago I realized that I have an informal list of jokes, parables, and videos that I use in everyday conversation on projects to make a point. Sometimes […]
World wide Windows Outrage — I mean Outage
If you’re one of those executives that got rid of the test role and then didn’t have any serious study or support of it by workers … … I hope […]
Measuring test improvement
Ideas for testing improvement are everywhere – write some tooling, test in production, shift testing left, “sprinkle some AI on it”, and so on. But how will we know if […]
A quick tour of test strategy!
Michael Larsen and our Managing Director, Matthew Heusser are giving a talk on their newest book, Software Testing Strategies on Wed, 13 Mar at 6:00PM Pacific time. The event is […]
All aboard for the mystery tour – step right this way!
With Coronavirus, conference speaking sort of went away. Excelon went from participating in a dozen events a year to … maybe one. It’s time we got up and looked around, […]
Third day of Christmas – Fundamental Issues in Test Automation
Let’s continue the conversation about our Testing Strategies book, talking about chapter the Fundamental Issues in test automation chapter. We’ve made a Youtube playlist for the various “days of Testing […]
On Tests and Test Design – Chapter 1 of the new book
It’s time for a days-of-Christmas video that actually covers a real chapter of the book. The book is Software Testing Strategies, and today’s video is an attempt to hit some […]
We wrote a book on testing and more!
It’s been a quiet year. We haven’t blogged like you might expect, been at conferences, or published like you might expect. Part of that is what is going on in […]
… And thank you for your support
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The […]
Moving forward
It’s an odd time in history. Travel budgets were cut to Cornoavirus; some never came back. Silicon Valley Layoffs for tech workers number in the hundreds of thousands. It is […]
A CI/CD Tune-Up …
An odd thing has started to happen to us in the course of our consulting work. If it were just once or twice, we’d note it, and move on. Instead, […]