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 […]
Individuals and Interactions
The Agile Manifesto says to focus on individuals and interactions over process and tools. At Excelon, we go further to say that may be the single largest driver of performance. […]
A Real Interview Result
We’ve been studying lemon markets lately. HR departments simply can not understand every role in the organization, so they hire recruiters. But let’s be honest about the standard for recruiters. […]
Lean Coffee at KWSQA
I just ran facilitator’s training at KWSQAConf, where I promised the attendees to provide my slides — both of them! Here you go. They are native to keynote and will […]
Announcing WhuTTT at the KWSQA Conference
We’ve been a little heads-down here at Excelon, working on our own projects, which we could discuss in a little more detail in a separate post. In the mean time, […]
The Need Experience/Get Experience Trap
Last night I put this advertisement up on Linkedin: Hello Folks. I’m looking to help place a mid to senior tester in the North Central Region of the USA. Relocation […]
On Observability
Imagine, for a moment, that you bought a home door lock. From your phone, you press the unlock button, and wait. Fifteen seconds pass. Thirty seconds pass. At about sixty […]
The Future of Maintainability is CI
Perhaps the most influential, and most humbling work in my career has been on Clean Code, by Robert C. Martin, where I was “just” a reviewer. Separating software along clean […]
The Next Chapter
Nine and a half years ago I wrote a blog post, offering a black-belt test challenge. Markus Gaertner, who I knew of and was about to know well, got heavily […]
Vote For Matt – Please?
After a five-year absence from the board I have decided to run again for the board of directors of the Association for Software Testing (AST). As part of that process, […]