THE BOOK OF TESTING

Thoughts From a Braidy Tester

This post will be my last. For now at least - I cannot see into the future, so I will not say I will never blog here again.

Thanks to all of you readers, and an especial thanks to each of you who commented on my writings. See you 'round the blogosphere!

Posted by The Braidy Tester at 07:30 AM  Permalink |

Dave Liebreich bills himself as a software testing architect, a consultant, a coach, and a manager. I bill him as someone who knows a whole lot about testing. Regardless of whether he is helping your team as an individual contributor, your Director Of Test, or anything in between, Dave can help your team become its Best Option version of yourself.

Dave has served as Test Architect at Mozilla Corporation and as QA Manager at Yahoo!, so he knows his way around complex, distributed, networked systems. What's more, he has the know-how to translate his experiences into the product you are building, even if said product is neither complex nor distributed nor networked. Through it all, Dave helps you keep track of what you are doing, why you are doing it, and how you will know you are done.

Here is what Dave has to say:

Continue reading "Five Questions With Dave Liebreich"

Posted by The Braidy Tester at 07:30 AM  Permalink |

Scott Louvau writes software for Microsoft. He doesn't write any software you have ever used, though, unless you have ever worked on his team. The software Scott writes, you see, is the software his team uses to test their product. To paraphrase the commercial, Scott doesn't test the software you use, he makes the testing of the software you use better.

Scott tells me that if he was not in software he would be some sort of craftsman because "I really like the idea of doing a job you can get better at every day". He recounts a Discovery Channel special on how aircraft carriers are built, a process which involves welding together giant panels of steel. The host watched as a welder took a panel which had buckled from the heat of welding it and completely flattened it with a single hit of his hammer. When the host asked the welder how he knew where and how to hit the panel, the welder replied "Twenty-eight years on the job".

Although Scott has only six years on the job so far, I am sure his teammates would agree that he knows where and how to hit their buckled panels in order to flatten them out. Here is what Scott has to say:

Continue reading "Five Questions With Scott Louvau"

Posted by The Braidy Tester at 07:30 AM  Permalink |

Michael Kelly is a tester's tester. He talks about testing on his blog as well as in magazines ranging from InformIT to Better Software. He talks about testing at the Indianapolis Workshops on Software Testing he co-founded as well as at conferences ranging from the Indianapolis Quality Assurance Association Quality Enrichment Conference to the upcoming Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference. And he tests software for companies large and small as well as for the fun of it.

Regardless of how you come to know Michael, his passion for improving the craft of testing and for helping testers improve themselves comes shining through. Here is what Michael has to say:

Continue reading "Five Questions With Michael Kelly"

Posted by The Braidy Tester at 07:30 AM  Permalink |

Dmitri Klementiev tests software at Microsoft. No, he develops software for Microsoft. No, he tests software for Microsoft. I'm confused.

Oh, I get it: Dmitri is the type of tester for whom Microsoft originally coined the title Software Development Engineer in Test: he spends his days developing software to help other testers better do their job. In Dmitri's case this has largely meant putting massive amounts of time into developing the tool many Microsoft testers use to automate their drive-my-application's-user-interface test cases. Dmitri's Doctorate Of Mathematics and experience in mathematical and computer modeling seems to be holding him in good stead as he navigates the intricacies of automating the user interfaces of Microsoft's many different applications and operating systems.

Here is what Dmitri has to say:

Continue reading "Five Questions With Dmitri Klementiev"

Posted by The Braidy Tester at 07:30 AM  Permalink |

Gil Broza broke Edgar Allen Poe's second cipher. Gil Broza is a certified NLP Master Practitioner. Gil Broza is living what he describes as a "wild life" as he learns how to raise twins.

Perhaps more germane to this blog, however, is that Gil Broza has been working on software for close to two decades and has been XPing and Agileing for much of that time. Regardless of whether you have a financial, bioinformatics, or content delivery system to maintain or to build, Gil can show you, coach you, and help you do so in an Agile and Industrial XP fashion. You may have heard Gil talking at Agile 2008, at DDJ's own SD Best Practices conference, or at one of Industrial Logic's workshops on various XP-related topics.

Here is what Gil has to say:

Continue reading "Five Questions With Gil Broza"

Posted by The Braidy Tester at 07:30 AM  Permalink |

Keith Braithwaite is hard core about doing good work. As a Principal Consultant with Zuhlke, he works with teams to help the do the good work they know they are capable of yet do not know how to achieve. One example I particularly like involved building a system to autogenerate trades. While trading systems are complicated in and of themselves, this particular system had to negotiate banking calendars for many different countries in order to determine when and where particular trades would be valid. The development team had mired themselves in a marsh of messiness as they attempted to codify the rules for this system. Keith helped them make their way out of this swamp by having them define examples of the rules rather than the rules themselves. This approach worked well - so well , in fact that no defects have been reported since the system entered production!

Keith was an early adopter of Extreme Programming and Agile and has learned lots about how to succeed (and fail) at adopting these practices for everything from line-of-business applications to embedded software. For the last several years he has been passing along his learnings to the rest of us in the form of blog posts, papers, and presentations, including several talks at the recent Agile 2008.

Here is what Keith has to say:

Continue reading "Five Questions With Keith Braithwaite"

Posted by The Braidy Tester at 07:30 AM  Permalink |

Michael Corning is a man on a mission. No small mission, either: his goal is to remake testing at Microsoft, and then throughout the rest of the world. Michael joined Microsoft's Engineering Excellence group in part to pursue this mission, which involves patterns applied at every level, concepts ranging from robotics to Aristotle, and innovative testing approaches from across Microsoft and the industry. Dunno whether he will be successful in this endeavor; regardless, I imagine he and his compatriots are in for a fun ride. (Full Disclosure: I am a founding compatriot.)

If this seems an audacious goal, well, Michael is an audacious guy. He is so passionate about politics - both in general and in specifics - that he is Team Lead for the Microsoft Political Action Committee. As a volunteer planning commissioner for his town he is leading a comprehensive for-the-next-century replanning effort which involves patterns applied at every level, concepts ranging from robotics to Aristotle, and innovative technologies from across Microsoft and the industry. As before, while I don't know whether he will be successful in this endeavor, I imagine he and his compatriots are in for a fun ride.

(Can you guess what he talks about in the testing classes he teaches? Yep: patterns applied at every level, concepts ranging from robotics to Aristotle, and innovative technologies and testing approaches from across Microsoft and the industry.)

Here is what Michael has to say:

Continue reading "Five Questions With Michael Corning"

Posted by The Braidy Tester at 07:30 AM  Permalink |

Ethan John professes to not enjoy writing code. Testing, on the other hand, he enjoys immensely. That makes him my kind of Computer Science graduate: the kind who codes only because it gives him an excuse to test. Ethan currently works for Isilon Systems, who I am sure is happy to have the advantage of his love for testing.

Here is what Ethan has to say:

Continue reading "Five Questions With Ethan John"

Posted by The Braidy Tester at 07:30 AM  Permalink |

Amol Kher has been a tester at Microsoft for five years and change. While his feature teams appreciate his contributions to their work, testers across Microsoft appreciate his contributions to theirs: as one of the authors of a popular internal model-based testing tool, Amol is directly responsible for powering up their testing efforts. Amol has been powering up testers in a different way of late with his recent move into people leading, which he is discovering to be every bit as challenging as writing his model-based testing tool has ever been. He has a new challenge at home as well in the person of his infant son.

Here is what Amol has to say:

Continue reading "Five Questions With Amol Kher"

Posted by The Braidy Tester at 07:30 AM  Permalink |