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 thread as twitter seems to only pick children. Eventually Danny Faught, James Bach and I got into a bit of a jam session. Part of […]
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 business does not equate to failure; there are plenty of people who move on from one success to another. Yet it is true that it […]
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 programmer has no responsibilities outside of the tooling. The automation has had time to mature. It was supposed to speed you up. Now imagine this […]
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 difference. Personally, I’m a little leery of these accidental distinctions. Invent a technical distinction between, say Verification vs. Validation or Delivery Vs. Deployment can save […]
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 not do in my book is provide enough of a litmus-test to say “Yes, this is, or is not, Continuous Testing.” So I am proposing […]
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 ago, I realized that email was become my Integrated Development Environment (IDE) during Covid. While I am a “power user” when it comes to programming […]
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 man who invented the spreadsheet, Dan Bricklin, and I got to test his web-based collaborative spreadsheet. If you averaged my time since, about 80% of […]
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 to a speaker talk about “testing” without drawing a distinction between regression testing and story-testing, I put out the tweet above. I know, I know, […]
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 wikiQtests, as they were tests expressed in a wiki that contained selenium commands. The folks at O’Reilly asked me to contribute a chapter to the […]
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 keep changing, the tooling will need maintenance. Done well, this will allow you to release software more frequently with less risk. Done poorly, this costs […]
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. So. How. Do. You. Do. That. ? I just wrote up two quick ways to do just that. These are practices you can put into […]
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. A good recruiter knows that JavaScript is in the browser and “not compiled” and the Java is, well, different, and is compiled. Or whatever. If […]
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 probably look best in that format. Slides in powerpoint format Slides in PDF format Slides in keynote format For a more detailed, text-based introduction, you […]
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, we’ve been gathering material to teach software testing as a skill-based activity. That turns out to be a lot harder than it sounds.
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 provided. Salary and benefits from day 1. Must be able to work in the USA, cannot sponsor visas. Must be onsite. Testing work is for […]
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 seconds, you get a pop-up, that your unlock message failed to send. Back in the real world, fifteen seconds later, you hear a snicker-snack as […]
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 lines of interface, adding the ability to swap parts out, combined with clean implementation and unit tests allow teams to make truly maintainable software. Despite […]
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 involved and asked about the system – what does it mean to be a black-belt exactly? I got my belt from JCPenny, so Miagi-Do was […]
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, I dashed off a reply to a six-question interview that included a biography. That questionnaire was pretty good, but I wanted to expand on my […]
Do you even (need to) automate the GUI?
Over the past eighteen months, the single greatest lesson I have learned about software was in the gym. That is, the human body works as a system. When you lift a heavy box, every muscle group in the chain lifts the box. The best way to strengthen those muscles is to work the body as […]