Our managing director, Matt Heusser, has been nominated for the Agile Awards again this year – this time in three categories. Most Valuable Agile Professional, Person Who Has Done Most to Promote Agile, and, of course, the one we were expecting, Most Popular Online Contributor. Voting is free from any business email address. The event […]
Read MoreExcelon At CAST2016
Can you believe it’s only a week to TestRetreat and CAST? It’s time to talk about some plans. Excelon Development, along with a few friends, is renting a small condominium for CAST; it is roughly two blocks from the Conference Center for CAST. TestRetreat will be at the Best Western Plus Chateau Granville Hotel & […]
Read MoreWhat We’ve been up to At Excelon
There’s been quite a dustup in the twitterverse and the blogosphere over the last couple of weeks. The dustup includes attack, defense, counter-attack and counter-defense. At Excelon, we’ve mostly stayed out of those public debates. Instead, we’ve been quietly working on our own, doing things we didn’t want to announce until they were ready. We […]
Read MoreMore on the “Attack on the Testing Role”
About a month ago I took a slide from James Bach’s Orcas Island Training and posted it to twitter. The internet became very upset, I suspect more from the writing style than the content. As the person who posted a single slide without context, I felt obligated to explain and wrote up a 1,600 word […]
Read MoreMake Software Testing Great … Again?
Yesterday, as I was attending James Bach’s course reinventing testers, I took a picture of a slide that I knew would be contentious in the Software Testing world … and still tweeted it. The responses were as acrimonious as the original text, and my response, which boiled down to “hey man, it’s not my slide” […]
Read More“Must have Agile/Scrum Experience”
Recently, someone asked me what “Must have Agile/Scrum Experience” in job descriptions and advertisements actually means. It got me thinking, so I wrote it up for Medium.com What’s medium, you ask? It’s a relatively new website designed for shorter, more personal writing. There are no ads on it, writers are not compensated; I’m using it […]
Read MoreTest Estimation Hacks — Plus An Interview!
If you can’t make QualityJam, the QASymphony user conference next week, you can still listen to Matt and Justin in the webinar “Test Estimation Hacks“, the week after, April 21st, from 2-3PM Eastern. We’re especially pleased to say that the webinar is about actually estimating the test process – it is not a sales presentation. […]
Read MoreTestRetreat at CAST2016
It’s been four years since the Association for Software Testing ran Test Coach Camp as a two-day pre-conference event. Limited to thirty people and by-application, we ran the event using Open-Space Technology, with the attendees proposing and running the sessions they were interested. AST supported the event with a grant to cover food and facilities, […]
Read MoreValid Measures for Mere Humans
“Metrics that are not valid are dangerous” – One of the principles of Context-Driven Testing In Action Over the weekend, I got in another silly argument over the internet. Martin Burns referenced a Rally whitepaper, claiming that teams that used task hours and story points had 250% more quality than teams doing #NoEstimates. At first […]
Read MoreMaking QA Strategic – Let’s Get Real
This February, for the third time in a row, I made the trek from West Michigan to Columbus, OH, for the QA Or The Highway Conference. The show maxed out the facility, and featured keynotes from Karen Johnson, now at Salesforce.com, and Bramha Ghosh of Google. The pleasant surprise for me was the debate on […]
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