Test Obsessed

I recently had the opportunity to visit AboutUs in Portland, OR. In case you’re not familiar with AboutUs, they’ve created a community-driven wikified guide to websites. (So how appropriate that I’m blogging this on the 14th birthday of the Wiki, as Ward Cunningham reminded us over Twitter, another catalytic technology.) Anyway, AboutUs is doing very [...]

Certification of software professionals has been a hot topic for quite a while. At least 15 years. Maybe longer. I keep hoping that the whole thing will blow over. But it hasn’t. And it’s not going to. Too many people have too much of a financial stake in the success of certifications. Certification customers, including [...]

I was honored to be included on the lunch and learn panel at the Software Quality Association of Denver (SQuAD) conference this week. One of the questions that came up had to do with triaging bugs in an Agile context. Here’s my answer, in a bit more detail than I could give at the panel. [...]

Shameless plug alert! Dale Emery and I are offering the 3-day Agile Testing Series of classes in Pleasanton, CA on April 22 – 24, 2009, and in Portland, OR on April 28 – 30, 2009. We’ve structured the three days as a la carte offerings. You can take one, two, or all three days. Day [...]

It had already been a frustrating morning. Too little sleep, and too little coffee. Squabbling kids. Traffic. Parents who didn’t know how to use the carpool lane at school and just stopped in the middle of the road, holding up traffic for 5 minutes while Junior fetched his lunchbox from the depths of the giant [...]

I’m planning all the little logistical details for my upcoming trip to Portland, Oregon to talk with the XPDX group about ATDD. Details like how I’ll get from point A to point B. The TriMet site for the fabulous lightrail (that I am hoping will make it possible for me to cancel that car reservation [...]

On February 5, a group of us gathered in my office on First Street in Pleasanton for the first ever “Open Source Test Automation Tool Love In” (OSTATLI). Joining in were: Dale Emery, Jeffrey Fredrick, Kevin Lawrence, Dave Liebreich, Ken Pier, and Chris Sims. Several folks have asked me to post the results of the [...]

I’m in the process of writing marketing copy for a series of public classes that Dale Emery and I will be offering on April 22 – 24 in Pleasanton, CA and April 28 – 30 in Portland, OR. (I am also still working on getting the registration system to bend to my will, so you [...]

The subject of how much to automate, and the related topic of how to calculate the ROI for test automation, comes up on a regular basis. In fact, it popped up on a couple of the mail lists I read recently. Usually there’s at least one person arguing that test automation is expensive and that [...]

So it’s the start of a new year, and as part of my strategic plan for 2009 I’m picking up where I left off with my experiments in virtual training. I’m not ready to offer virtual training commercially just yet. But I am getting closer. I’m still figuring out packaging and pricing. And I’m still [...]