We could define test velocity as the speed at which we cover the software in order to final risks to quality. If we spend time looking deeply into the […]
Software Testing Secrets
It’s been 25 years since our Managing Director, Matt Heusser, gave his first lightning talk at OSCon. These five-minute talks are powerful because the speaker actually has time to make […]
What we’ve been up to at Excelon!
With things slowing down a bit, our Managing Director, Matt Heusser, has been out and about a little more, and we have new material. Given it’s been awhile since we’ve […]
NOTAM and Resilience
On Tuesday, January 10th, the US Federal Aviation Administrations (FAA) Notice to Air Missions, or NOTAM, system, went down overnight. As a direct result, no planes took off overnight or […]
The place for #ChatGPT
, Two weeks ago I took my first, presumptive look at #ChatGPT for testing. The app has real potential, and seems to have some ability to learn. It’s tempting to […]
ChatGPT for testers
How We Got Here Seventy years ago Alan Turing proposed that real Artificial Intelligence (AI) would be able to interact with the person through a keyboard and screen just like […]
Let’s get the band back together
It’s been eight years since we announced Software Delivery 24/7. The idea was to have a safe place to talk about software, a conference list, a resource list — a […]
Introducing Contracting (+)

The 2020 Global Pandemic hit friends and family hard. For those who made it through, the loss of loved ones, economic damage, and forced isolation are not something to ignore. […]
On working remote and mini-retreats …
A lot of us are working remote now. That is good. It seems that most of us have just traded a cubicle for a home office. That wasn’t the point; […]
A Followership Hack
You are brought into a project that is sort of a dream project. It may be a contract, it might be a new job, or it might be to do […]
On the term “Community” (or: Software Testing Fundamentals)
Yesterday I wrote this on twitter: The chain that followed generated a fair bit of conversation. Some of the replies generated replies; it can be difficult to follow the entire […]
Ten Years of Excelon
“[Some large]% of companies fail within three years and [even larger %] fail within five.” – Every small business article ever That quote above is overly simplistic. Ending a […]
Automation Delay – and how to prevent it
Pretend for a moment you are a new development manager or director. You hired a programmer to lead a test automation effort. Gave the programmer time, resources, and attention. The […]
Nice Versus Kind
Sometimes you overhear things. One of the things I have overheard a lot lately is this idea that nice and kind are different. It is important, then, to know the […]
Continuous Testing: Defined
If you check Wikipedia, or google, you’ll likely come to the Consensus-version definition of Continuous Testing. That definition is fine, I guess, as far as it goes. What it does […]
Pushing forward at Excelon
How’s everybody handling the apocalypse? At Excelon, our testing work has slowed down a bit, providing more time to do research and publish. “Doing” Email … Better A few weeks […]
On Remote Work – For TechRepublic
Long-time Excelon fans probably remember that back in 2008-2011 I was working from-home for Socialtext. That was some of the most intense, high-functioning time of my career. We hired the […]
Regression-Testing Redux

I was recently at SauceCon, the annual conference for Sauce Labs. Sauce provides the grid (and cloud of mobile devices if you want them) to run selenium scripts on. Listening […]
Your Late Christmas Present
beautiful testing book cover If you wanted a Christmas present, I’m here for you. My last employer, Socialtext, developed one of the first long-term successful selenium implementations. We called them […]
Test Tool Maintenance
When the test tooling finally runs the first time, it won’t find anything. And runs after that, that might find something. Those runs aren’t free either, as the system will […]