I taught a one-day workshop at StarEast yesterday with Esther. I was astonished at the number of test managers who think testing is a service. Effective testing is not a service. Effective testing is an integral part of development. When people–especially senior management–consider testing a service, there are inevitable consequences: Testers multitask between several […]
I’m an assertive, bold, blunt, and direct person. I try to live within the bureaucracies I encounter, but I don’t always succeed. I’m at SD West this week, where I did a half-day tutorial Monday and am presenting two classes (really talks) today. Before I speak/teach/consult, I like to eat a real breakfast, so
I have an all-in-one machine, a fax/copier/scanner/printer, that I use for copying, scanning and primarily faxing. It’s fine fax machine. And it’s a great copier. But when I hook it up to my computer for scanning to a file, it falls apart. Half the time (or more), my computer can’t establish a USB connection
I facilitated a management problem-solving session at the STARWest conference yesterday. When I was debriefing the activities, one participant said he’s met a bunch of testers and test managers who had a “siege” mentality. He was surprised by that. I’m still surprised when I meet people like that. I sometimes see developers who feel
In Architects Must Write Code, several architects responded that I was too prescriptive (I’m summarizing their comments). Maybe. But I don’t think so. I’m in a nice hotel, where things just don’t work completely right. Yes, the hotel is clean (that’s the big thing with me). The hotel upgraded me to a suite with an
My friend and colleague, Stever Robbins, has started a blog, and one of his early posts is Are engineers living on another planet? Don’t they use their software? Unfortunately, not always. It takes self-discipline and the desire to look for problems to cause people to create systems that allow them to use their own
Matisse has an interesting post, Software is like Building Construction. He talks about iterative design and the interdependencies of people with deliverables as being common to construction and software. In my opinion, he’s not all wrong, but he’s not all right. I agree that there are plenty of design-build firms who wait until the
I changed ISPs last Friday. At some point Friday, my ISP bounced my email with a strange (to me) message. This is the same ISP that had problems just a few months ago, so I was done. I need email up virtually 100% of the time. And if I can’t receive email, I need
If you’ve wanted to catch some of my presentations but were unable to make it to a conference or one of my speaking engagements, you have three opportunities this fall that don’t require you to leave your desk. I’ll be doing a series of webinars for Orasi, about the impact of people and relationships
Clarke Ching’s post, Functional Blindess, reminded me to post the ways I know about how to see the current state in a project or in an organization. For projects: Ask to see a demo. Can you see anything at all? If you can’t see the results of prototype tests, unit tests, some kind of