Time flies…

Our friends at WordPress was just just kind enough to remind me that it is three years since I started blogging… for what its worth…. and I guess, indirectly, asking where my next piece of prose is.

Who defines Testing?

I just read a post by Tony Bruce on making excuses for why a bug was not found until later testing cycles/UAT/Production. Good post, great read, as always. You can find it at dancedwiththetester.blogspot.co.uk

In the last part of the post Tony writes:

I am not a gate keeper, I am an information provider, I have limited time to provide what information I can. I will do my best, the people around me will do their best and sometimes we will not be able to investigate everything.

This reminded me of a matter that has been bugging me a bit for a while; I see a lot of people stating that “Testing is…” and then some definition or list of tasks as if this is the One and Only Truth.

Oh yeah? Is it really? According to whom? Who decides?

What else to absorb in the land of tulips (difficult, difficult part III)

Alrighty… only a short week left until the show kicks off in Amsterdam, and it is time to finish the roadmap for my attendance. With so many good presentations to choose from it is worth giving some thought to the selection process (Matt Heusser has some good tips here). I dealt with the first couple of days here and here, so that leaves us with the second half:

What will I do in Amsterdam? (difficult, difficult, part II)

As mentioned in the previous post deciding to go to a conference like EuroSTAR 2012 is only part of the decision process. There are so many presentations and workshops to choose from that you quickly start feeling like a kid in a candy store; what to go at first?

Difficult, difficult, lemon difficult

After convincing myself to invest in a trip to Amsterdam (for EuroSTAR 2012) I thought the hard decisions were made… then I was faced with the task of actually deciding what tutorials and presentations to attend. As Simon Foster so eloquently put it in the movie In the Loop: difficult, difficult, lemon difficult.

Monkey business

Testing, depending on who you ask, can be a lot of things. From mindlessly following the detailed instructions written by someone else (perhaps years ago, for a totally different version of the product), to the challenging, inspiring task of using your intellect to gather information through exploration of a product or project, and all sorts of shades in-between. Is any one approach more correct or valid than the other?

Any person off the street

Have you ever heard a programmer been instructed to write code that any randomly selected carpenter can immediately read and understand?